What makes cucumbers burpless

None caused burping for them. Subjects who did have a burping problem found that American bitter and American non-bitter both caused significant burping and to the same degree. The English cucumber caused minor burping.

This test only looked at one cultivar of each type of cucumber. You probably think the answer here is obvious. If you have eaten them then you know they are bitter free. To test if they produce cucurbitacins, the bitter compounds in cucumbers, subjects were asked to eat cotyledon leaves.

These judges were specially trained to evaluate bitterness and this is a common technique used to evaluate breeding efforts. All 12 of the tested English cucumbers were bitter. In hindsight, this is not surprising since none of these English cultivars have been bred to remove the genes that cause bitterness. English cucumbers possess the genes for making them bitter, the vegetation is bitter, but not enough of the chemical enters the fruit to make it taste bitter to us.

From a chemical and genetic perspective, they are NOT bitter free. Since English cucumbers produce cucurbitacin and are burp free, these compounds are not the cause of burping , as so many sources claim. The reality is that research has not identified the compounds that cause burping. How to Grow Cucumbers Without Bitterness. Press here to subscribe. Garden Myths - Learn the truth about gardening.

Similar plants sometimes cross, causing all kinds of taste issues in the resulting seeds. When you plant the offspring seeds of cross-bred cucurbits you can get some strange flavors indeed.

And seed catalogs are all over it. But flavor, especially bitterness, does matter. Bitterness is an issue for anyone who loves to eat and what makes a cucumber bitter is a plant compound called cucurbitacins. You can have high and low cucurbitacin levels in fruits from the same plant depending on the stress levels the plant endured during the growing season. Stress from variables such as moisture fluctuations, and temperatures that vary more than 20 degrees in a single day, can cause cucurbitacin levels to increase.

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