Picking Bell Peppers When Produce Shopping

Series Summary

When buying fruits, vegetables, and other farm-produced goods, freshness is an absolute must. Whether you shop at a supermarket, a greengrocer, or a farmers' market for your produce, there is a basic food inspection ritual you've doubtlessly witnessed which fascinates and even frightens those of us who nourish ourselves entirely on a diet of fast foods. What are they looking for? How do they know which test to run on which vegetable? What is this secret knowledge which allows some to eat fresher than others?

In these free videos expert J. Costilla shows you how to pick the best fruits and vegetables when shopping for produce. He shows you exactly what to look for to help you choose the highest quality produce, from lemons and limes, from tomatoes and tomatillos, from apples to avocados and from peaches to peppers. How do you tell when a watermelon is ripe? What should mushrooms look like? How do you pick the best mango? J. Castillo answers all these questions and more in these free videos. Hopefully his tips and advice will prevent you from ever ending up with produce more suitable for theater criticism.

Video Transcript

"Hi everybody my name is J and I'm talking to you on behalf of expertvillage.com and today I'm going to be talking to you about picking produce. The first type of produce is going to be your bell pepper. There is green, yellow and red bell pepper. Today I've got a green one. The first thing you want to do obviously is you’re going to look at your produce. You want to make sure it's nice and bright in color, like this one is. You want to make sure the produce has a beautiful texture to it, nice and smooth all the way around. You don't want to see any types of dents or bruising. So when you feel this you want it to be nice and firm. You don't want any type of soft spots and you want to make sure that the inside right here is nice and green, you don't want any black or brown and on the stem you don't want any black or brown, you want it to be nice and green like this one. Basically what you can do is smell your bell pepper at the store and you want to make sure that it smells like a pepper. You want it to have a nice mild peppery smell. If it doesn’t have one then it’s probably not ripe. So basically you're going to look at it, you're going to feel it, and you're going to smell it. You should have a very good bell pepper at home. Another thing you might want to consider is storing your bell pepper inside of a nice dry place. This keeps it nice and fresh longer. You definitely don't want to put it in the fridge or keep it out in the sun, so keep this in a nice dry area and you should have a very nice bell pepper. Thank you."