WHAT’S FRESH: BUYING OPPORTUNITIES : Cool as a Cuke : And don’t try to cook, steam or fry them, they’ll just melt on you.

The saying “cool as a cucumber” not only describes a calm and self-assured individual, but it also describes the best temperature for preparing and eating this crispy fruit.

Made up of more than 95% water, cucumbers, which are now in season, don’t take kindly to being heated.

“If you try to cook or steam or fry them, they just melt on you; they turn into mush,” said Henry Flores, manager of Noren’s Market at 5171 Telegraph Road, Ventura. Flores recommends pickling the fruit or eating it raw in salads or by itself with a little bit of salt and pepper.

The human body was designed to eat its food raw, according to Stanley Mitchell, a nutritionist with the Healthology Center in Ventura. “After all, God didn’t put a stove in the Garden of Eden,” he said.

Mitchell said cucumbers, at 4.1 calories per ounce, are loaded with potassium, iron and magnesium and are especially good for the gallbladder, liver, kidneys, hair, teeth and nails.

Customers should look for firm, dark-green cucumbers with a blunt or rounded tip, not a pointed one, said Maryann Carpenter, who works at Organic Vitality, a new roadside stand at Telephone Road and Olivas Park Drive in Ventura.

Tom Dullam, who sells his cucumbers at the Ventura Farmers Market, recommends slicing the fruit and soaking it in Japanese rice vinegar for 24 to 48 hours. “Then serve the slices as hors d’oeuvres,” he said. “It tastes great. Every time we get ahold of some rice vinegar it disappears right away.”

The Farmers Market is open Wednesdays, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., at the Montgomery Ward Parking lot in Ventura, Main Street and Mills Road; and 8:30 a.m. to noon on Saturdays at Santa Clara and Figueroa streets in Ventura. Both Flores and Dullam grow and sell regular field varieties and European cucumbers. The common kind are about 70 cents per pound at roadside stands, while the European type range from 75 cents to $1 each. In about a week, Dullam will also begin carrying lemon cucumbers which, he said, have a milder taste than regular ones and are round and golden colored, much like a lemon.

The European cucumbers are also called hothouse or greenhouse cucumbers and are over a foot long. (They are the ones that are sold in plastic wrap at supermarkets.) They have a thinner skin than the regular kind, and are therefore not bitter and do not need to be peeled.

The Armenian cucumber, also thin-skinned, grows to about two feet long and about 2 1/2 inches across, said Rick Brecunier, manager of Tierra Rejada Ranch in Moorpark. They are light green and have a ribbed texture running lengthwise “which leaves a pretty design when sliced,” he said. They are 65 cents per pound if customers pick their own, and 75 cents per pound at the roadside stand, 3370 Moorpark Road.