I fell down a rabbit hole and it was all about carrots.
Someone posted an interesting piece, about carrots in France that are AOC or Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, meaning they have to meet strict planting and growing requirements. For the humble carrot.
So, I went in pursuit of what the rules are to get AOC status. My first few searches on Google brought up many pages about AOC—Alexandrea Ocasio Cortez (thanks AI). Then there were 23 pages on the French website for AOC carrottes. The big difference is that les carottes des sables de Créances are picked and sold with the sand on them, not to add more weight (well maybe) but to distinguish them from their dirt-grown cousins. Legend has it that the carrots were originally planted in the sand because a poor farmer in Normandy who, having inherited no land, tried, in desperation, to use the sands of the basin as soil and the seaweed as fertilizer.
This is what was on the Internet (translated from the French): “The carrot of the sands of Créances has so many qualities that we no longer know exactly what makes it a delicious and healthy vegetable. Unless it is its red label that is a guarantee of its exception: grown in sandy soil amended with seaweed as a natural plant fertilizer, harvested by hand, packaged on site and preserved in its original sand, it has all the makings of a carrot apart.”
Just by chance, I found some sandy carrots in a market in Paris recently. They weren’t labeled AOC, so I don’t know if they were the real deal, or just dirty. I grabbed a few to bring home and test, comparing to Nice’s finest.
After carefully scrubbing the sandy carrots (Theresa was right, you need to segregate them — or end up cleaning sand from anything they touch). I sliced up one of each (unpeeled) and tried them. The sandy one was a little bitter and tasted like a normal (and not great) carrot. The regular one was a little bit sweeter — not a huge difference. Being curious, I decided to try another sandy carrot. Maybe a little less bitter than the first, but it wasn’t as earth-shattering as the ones in the post I read.
Maybe the taste test has to wait for the spring. May is supposed to be the month for the carottes des sables. I’ll report back.
The sandy carrots are the 2 in the front.
