I hope he does "cold cucumber soup." It's cool and refreshing, and doesn't require cooking so it won't add extra heat to a house on hot days. At a place I worked we would hire a couple J1 people during the summer. One of them was from Eastern Europe and he brought a container of it for lunch a couple times. I remember it was pretty much cucumbers, dill, garlic, lemon/lime, good olive oil, and yogurt. He made his own yogurt and that could be another reason it tasted so good. He said Greek yogurt would work if you don't have homemade.
I really love these video formats. One more scientifique video and then 1-2 recipes about the concept/food product. You feel like you don't only know how to make the recipe you also know why it works!
@@wavenp It's really nice, I'm sure the info stuff comes up while getting the dish planned (or at least sought out). It's basically a few-for-one in terms of video production and that's the kind of efficiency I can get behind, haha. Plus it's more great content for viewers!
Seedless English cucumbers you buy in the store are "parthenocarpic"- they develop fruit without requiring pollination. This is so they can be grown in an enclosed space without using so much pesticides. This has a convenient side effect of the seeds not developing, so long as you avoid it getting pollinated by some other cucumber (which would cause it to form seeds normally). The "seeds" you see in an english cuke are just the remnants of where the seeds would form- the shell, basically.
My German eyes were quite surprised to see that the US seems to be used to a very different kind of cucumber than we Europeans. As far as I can tell we also don't really have such a strong connection to them being cool, although "fresh tasting" is definitely a thing. The German name is also kind of cute for them: Schlangengurke (snake cucumber). Luckily I've never been bitten so far! Gurke is also where the English word gherkin comes from. It's a horribly mangled form of the plural "Gurken".
@@danm8004 The original word has no phonemes that don't exist in English, and it's using the plural for singular. I'd call that at least moderately mangled. Alternative that would sound almost identical to the German one: Goorkeh.
The white part of water melon also taste similar to cucumber. We used to eat the red part as fruit and thin slice the white part for stir fry. Extra veggie for no cost
In fact, I just realized that cucumbers might be melons a couple of days ago when trying to eat what I can only assume was an under-ripe or perhaps under-watered cucumber. The outer 2/3 of the flesh was pale and chewy, with a muted flavor. It wasn't appealing, but I realized partway through it that the pale flesh tasted like a melon with no sweetness, or perhaps the pale flesh of a watermelon.
@@sabatino1977 I'm not personally a huge fan of watermelon rinds (or watermelon and cucumbers in general, which is interesting considering i didnt know they were so similar at all), but definitely am not disgusted to the point I'd compare it to seal clubbing haha. I usually just dice em up along with any other compostables i have and throw em in the garden planter out front instead of tossing em in the trash, the earthworms seem to enjoy em greatly.
Today I learned, as a 34 year old, whos parents had a ranch and grew cucumbers, that ripe cucumbers would turn yellow instead of shrivelled up green raisins. Also why some cucumbers are bitter. Thank you Adam you rock.
everyone always look at me like im insane when i say cucumber is one of my favorite fruits. easy to grow, tasty, can be used in refreshing drinks or savory dishes or pickled.....whats not to like?
I used to often put them on my burger tho the very hot meat would instantly make the cucumbers super warm and a bit less fresh eating a heated cucumber is so incredibly different and odd I still like both tho .
Yup! I once made a "salad" of diced cucumber with apple, and the combination tasted almost exactly like watermelon. It was kind of a lightbulb moment for me and I still make it occasionally when I'm craving watermelon but it's not in season/too expensive/not available.
Cukes and watermelon rind are both excellent substrates for vinegar style pickles. I don't know if lactic acid fermentation works on rinds, since my dad didn't practice that and I am too lazy.
Now there's a good topic for another video: Do watermelon rinds have any toxicity? I was always told it's bad for you to eat too far into the rind, but I sometimes do anyway when I'm especially enjoying a melon and haven't noticed it causing me any problems.
Funny enough, cucumbers are called 青瓜 in Chinese - the latter character "瓜" meaning "melon" (and the former, "青", meaning "green"). This made me realise how English speakers don't necessarily correlate cucumbers with melons, whilst I just do it so subconsciously that I didn't notice until now.
A week or two ago my in-laws showed me that they were growing “Cucumelons,” little round cucumbers that tasted a lot like the rind of a watermelon. That makes sense now knowing that cucumbers are just melons by another name. Also, researchers totally missed out by not calling “cucumber aldehyde” something catchy like “cucumbaldehyde.”
It's so weird... I was JUST thinking this the other day when I was eating cucumber on it's own while chopping it for a salad, and the skin suddenly tasted oddly familiar. Maybe it was because the cucumber was not as ripe as usual, but after chewing on the skin and the part right under the skin a bit more carefully, I realized the taste was that of the dissatisfaction you get when eating a watermelon and you eat the white part next to the skin. It's like when you don't have any red part of a watermelon left and you go back to gnaw on the pink-white bits but it ends up tasting more like the white part, and that's what it tasted like to eat this cucumber skin... that's when I realized the seeds in the middle had the same shape as with a watermelon except the color and the hardness... really interesting to see this now and the science of it
Just wanted to say your videos got my girlfriend and I to start cooking together and it’s so much fun. I love educational/informative videos and love how you take a scientific approach to cooking, it makes it way easier for me to get interested in what’s going on. Much love from Atlanta!
Yes, he’s the reason I started cooking more and experimenting. Now I also follow other cooking shows like Ethan C, Food Wishes and this Mexican grandmother (de mi rancho).
I wonder if the burp could be from ethylene gas. When I was a radiology fellow, one of my professors used watermelons to simulate the human head for CT research and found that even uncut watermelons had gas collections in them. (Hence the hollow thump on a ripe melon.) He had the gas analyzed by a chemist and it was found to be ethylene, the same gas used to ripen fruit artificially. Maybe cucumbers also have enough dissolved ethylene to cause some people to burp.
I would assume the reason there is gas in the watermelon is that originally the where somewhat hollow before they were bred to be more or less full (you can see this in older paintings of watermelons). Maybe leaving behind smaller gaps in the flesh for the ethylene; which, correct me if I’m wrong, a lot of fruits produce naturally as well in order to ripen their fellow fruits near them on the plant. All this to say, I don’t know if cucumber have or had any cavities in them before being bred into their current form that could trap ethylene.
When I learned that such a simple compound was responsible for that when I read my Organic Chem book I found that to be the neatest thing. I expected something complicated, but instead got something wonderfully simple, that does a lot. You made a wonderful connection there Daryl, and you're probably right on the money.
If you look closely at the English cucumber you sliced, you’ll see the endocarps are hollow, AKA seedless. Some cucumbers have an allele for persistence, meaning they can ripen fruit without pollination. Those varieties are called “parthenocarpic.” My favorite variety is Beit Alpha. It will persist without pollination, will be seedless if unpollinated, is burpless and insanely crisp. Very productive and heat tolerant, too. *Never* allow a cucumber to ripen on the vine, not even once. If a single cucumber matures and becomes yellow, the vine will assume it successfully produced mature seed and will end its lifecycle, i.e. die back. Cucumbers will produce more fruit if you pick them more. Pick them early and often when the fruits are small, because the plant will panic and kick into overdrive, desperately producing as many fruits as possible out of fear than it won’t produce mature seed before season’s end. The goal of a cucumber plant is to reproduce, so if you prevent it from producing ripe fruit, it’ll keep cranking out fruits like crazy!
It’s interesting how many plants work like that, if you pull their fruit or trim their flowers, they try extra hard and you can get the same output as you’d need 10 plants for otherwise. It makes sense when you figure they evolved in an environment where they couldn’t control which animals tried to eat them I suppose.
@@joyful_tanya I'm glad to hear you had success. It's inevitable that we all eventually will miss a cucumber, and something will turn yellow. They hide very well. I always recommend starting new seedlings every 4-6 weeks to replace the existing plants, because it's only a matter of time until we either miss a cuke and they die back, or the cucumber plants themselves call it quits. They don't live long and aren't meant to survive all spring and summer into fall.
@@TheMillennialGardener thank you! We planted late here in zone 5b because of freezing temperatures at night well into May. We also have a relatively small garden area. I appreciate your advice! I learn new things every garden season! This year we rescued an eggplant seedling rolling around the parking lot of the hardware store. We brought it home and planted it. It's done beautifully and we learned that we like eggplant. It will definitely be something we plant again. 😁
The Korean melon, also called the Oriental melon, is noticeably less sweet than melons like cantaloupes and have been described as a cross between cucumbers and (sweet) melons. It is called chamoe (참외) in Korean, which means "true cucumber", oe (외, one syllable) being a contraction of oi (오이, two syllables), Korean for cucumber. Interestingly, in the southern and eastern dialects, the Korean melon is called oe and the cucumber is called muroe (물외) meaning "water oe". So oi/oe must have originally referred to both cucumbers and Korean melons before the need arose to differentiate them. Standard Korean decided that oi/oe without an adjective referred to cucumbers, while these dialects decided that it should refer to Korean melons. Western melons are unimaginatively called mellon (멜론) in Korean, not something like yang-oe (양외) "Western oe" as one might expect. Also, watermelons are called subak (수박) or "water gourd", so we don't seem to use oi/oe for anything other than cucumbers and Korean melons.
Most cucumbers seen in markets are long and a bit narrow, but wild cucumbers are small, oval shaped, and absolutely full of spikes. Strangely, I found a wild cucumber growing in eastern Washington State last summer. The fruit was growing from a vine that had stretched and wrapped it's way up a 20ft tree from the side of a small river. I only managed to grab the fruit because I had noticed it from the bridge I stood on next to the tree. I kept it and still have it, although it's completely dried. There are even some seeds inside. If you find those hidden gems growing in the forest, or even on the side of the road, please don't eat them. They're toxic.
The one bit (well, maybe two) you missed is that hot weather increases bitterness. A LOT. So "pickling cucumbers" might be fine for fresh eating early in the season and inedible later. And some varieties simply don't get bitter. I've been growing heirloom lemon cucumbers for 20 years for this reason. Even in the worst heat of summer they are still good fresh.
I currently have both at home, a cucumber and a watermelon. If you look at them, even the seeds of the cucumber are identical in shape, maybe even taste, to the watermelon.
@@WanderTheNomad Scientific or culinary? No wait, not really, because cucumbers are often treated as vegetables while melons are exclusively seen as fruit. The two aren't always compared either. So if you're in fantasy land and lie about what things are, then sure. Cucumbers are melons depending on what "definition" you use. Oblige me with your alternative facts, Ms. Conway.
In Turkey, when its season, we eat unripe melons (called "kelek"), which tastes pretty much like cucumber. Also check out "acur" variety, it is pretty refreshing snack during summer.
In southern Italy too some melon varieties (Carosello and Barattiere) are eaten green in salads. They have a great flavor, without bitterness and just a hint of melon sweetness.
In Mexico we make fruit flavoured water, and cucumber water, which always includes lime juice, tastes exactly like watermelon water with lime juice, which made it so clear to me that cucumbers are melons. Even bland or just non sweet watermelons just taste a lot like cucumber
In Swedish an old word for zucchini is stekgurka, meaning fry cucumber, a cucumber you fry instead of eating raw. Because of that I always thought they were closely related. It was also interesting to learn that the standard cucumber you buy in the grocery store is another variety in the US than in Sweden. Now I understand why so many recipies call for the to me unnecessary pealing.
I also thought "burpless" was a marketing gimmick, until last fall, our neighbors brought us a bunch of cucumbers they had grown... We made some cucumber salad with some rice wine vinegar, and some herbs... and I proceeded to burp repeatedly for hours. Always tasting the cucumbers. It wasn't unpleasant, aside from belching nonstop.
There's a mini cucumber variety called mouse melon. They are like normal cucumbers, but maybe a little bit sweeter. This was when I first realized that melons are pretty similar to cucumbers.
The cucumber you call "English cucumber" is called "Dutch cucumber" in Spain and "Japanese cucumber" in Brazil. I don't believe we will ever know where it is really from.
It really shows how much time, effort, work and research goes into producing your videos. I gladly appreciate it. You make some of the best videos on this platform.
As a child, my Slavic grandmother would often serve me fresh sliced cucumbers from her garden in vinegar with a bit of sugar. Total comfort food! 🥰 She also made the best pickles ever and her Borscht had no equal that I’ve ever found. 😋😋
Yep, it's a melon, in Chinese cucumbers are called 黄瓜, where the character 瓜 means melon, and the character 黄 means yellow, so the literal translation would be "yellow melon" (when ripe).
I was eating a cold pasta salad with cucumber chunks in it as I watched this. When the topic of "Are cucumbers cold?" came up I distinctly took some bites of pasta and cucumber separately and noticed, yeah, this cucumber feels WAY colder to eat and now I know why. Love that serendipity
I have been growing a variety my grandmother grew when I was a child this season. They are called ‘white wonder’ and are white or pale green. They seem to be milder than the green varieties and we have made both vinegar pickles and fermented pickles out of them. Thanks for the information about them. I didn’t know where they belonged but it makes sense based on what I know about them.
I'll never stop being impressed on how seamlessly he inserts the ads in his videos. I don't even want to skip, because they somehow feel an essential part of the video.
Regarding cucumber "burping" there's another theory behind this, attributing the effect mainly to air swallowing during ingestion. Because the thing is so crunchy yet slippery inside the mouth, many people tend to swallow it before it's thoroughly crushed between the teeth and the larger pieces mixed with saliva are trapping more air bubbles than normal. I hared this in med school some 20 years ago and I have no idea if there's any published study behind it or not.
I'm from Denmark and had never heard of the cucumber burping thing. I've lived in France and the UK, and have friends from many European countries. A quick internet search shows that the only Danish language mentions of cucumbers and burps are in machine translated American texts. I wonder if it's a (food) cultural thing.
I can totally believe that. I tend to get the burps from watermelon, but only if I eat it too quickly. I've always attributed it to swallowing air as I ate.
I get the same burps when I eat cucumbers, cantaloupe, or honeydew. Watermelon used to be a problem, too, but for some reason I can eat that now. Cucumbers are less of a problem if I peel and de-seed them. "American" cantaloupes are a problem, but "Italian" cantaloupes are no problem at all.
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2:25 Edible fruits are an adaptation to seed dispersal by animals. Therefore, the high water content in the fruits of the _Cucumis_ genus is probably an adaptation to a more efficient seed dispersal in hot climates (where drinkable water can be often scarce or hard to find) rather than to seed germination.
It could also be both. Evolution doesnt really have a single purpose when evolving new attributes in a species, so I wouldnt be surprised theres multiple evolutionary advantages at work here.
That's probably only one factor, I also think of the fruit as the germination bed for nutrients the seed will need to sprout, if not eaten. But then again, plants can never tell what it is we'll put into our mouths for fun next, can they?
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@@randomsandwichian, but if the fruit isn’t eaten, the seed(s) will hardly be dispersed. Hence the adaptation to produce edible fruits to be eaten by animals.
It's always been wild to me when people say that cucumbers don't taste like anything. I find them strongly flavored, and frankly not that agreeable unless prepared with some sort of acid (as in pickles, tzatziki, or raita).
I’m 98% sure it a genetic thing, like cilantro = soap. I have the same issue with cucumbers. It ruins a dish for me. Thankfully, i dont have the cilantro thing.
Funnily enough we've been growing Cucumbers for the first time (literally called 'Burpless' such and such variety) and have just started to harvest them in the past week or so. Two things I noticed as a novice grower were the little spikes all over them, and the unmistakable flavour of watermelon. They are really quite sweet, virtually no bitter notes you usually associate with store bought Cucumber. I even said to my wife 'hey I guess they are a kind of melon'. My wife is Polish and tells me the smaller lumpy variety they use in their dill brined 'Ogorki Kiszone' are what they call Field Cucumbers which grow along the ground rather than as climbers.
11:15 Love it when science finds out the reason for traditional food preparation practices (such as choosing especially the small ones for pickling). Edit: having googled kosher dill pickles, they do seem as the same that they make in every Slavic (and Slavic-influenced) food culture. If so, they are delicious, salty, tart, refreshing on a hot summer day and/or served with Hungarian potato sauce pasta.
I've never understood how anyone can say cucumbers are watery or tasteless. To me the have THE MOST POWERFUL FLAVOR of anything I've ever eaten in my 29 years of life. Maybe I'm particularly sensitive to some of those compounds Adam mentioned, because to me cucumbers (and celery too) are overwhelmingly pungent! Like to the point where I can barely even identify other ingredients in a salad, sandwich, or sauce that contains cucumber.
8:06 - I've got to say, I've never even seen *those* at the grocery store. The only cucumbers I see, and I tend to buy one every week, is much longer and thinner, and wrapped in plastic for some reason. Edit: of course I only needed to wait 30 seconds.
As a British viewer I was quite surprised to see what American cucumbers are like. Sometimes I skin an English/Seedless/burpless/Asian/long cucumber and use the skin as an addition to pulled pork and other similar dishes. The concentration of flavour and the firm texture is great, and the fact that this variety is so long and thin you can get quite a lot for not very much work. The only problem is figuring out what to do with the rest of the cucumber.
Thanks, this helps explain why I've always like pickles but have generally disliked cucumbers. It must be the cucurbitacins in it as I'm very sensitive to bitter things. This reminds me, if you are looking for topic ideas, it'd be interesting to learn more about what being a "super taster" means and the differences in types of super tasting.
@@SILVERF0X13 makes a lot of sense, you all want to be super at something. Newsflash, you are not a perfect and unique snowflake, you're simply a meat and bone mech being piloted by a smooth brain
Here in Mexico we have a classic "from grandma" method of removing the bitterness of a cucumber: slice the very tip of a cucumber, then start grinding the cut parts against each other. If done well, a while foam forms in the lip of the cut.
The ending was so satisfying. From the point you showed they turned orange/yellow I was sad you didnt show/tell us what its like eating one. So thank you for easing my mind at the last second
I’m so happy to hear that the aldehyde is also in watermelon. I taste similar bites between the two but it seems like that is not the norm when I mention it
Apparently you can reduce the bitterness by cutting off the ends and rubbing them on the rest of the melon. Not sure how/if it works but it's common in India (where I guess the native varieties are more bitter)
works great ! exactly as you said, just cut the ends and rub the cut parts, some kind of thick foam should form, that's where the bitterness is, just do it until that foam stops forming, repeat on the other end and you're good
Interesting to hear English cucumbers are marketed as burpless. I'm from the UK and get excess burps from cucumbers (and most non pickled cucumbers I've ever eaten have been English cucumbers), I can mitigate it somewhat by removing the seeds but even then too much cucmber is guaranteed to make me burp
One thing that might contribute to (or stem from) cucumber's 'coolness' is that in pre-modern Western medicine cucumber seeds were one of the 'four greater cold seeds' used in traditional remedies. Western medicine before the enlightenment had many parallels with what I see in Traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine, with hot, cold etc. (and probably borrowed a lot from India)
NCSU (who you referenced at least twice here) has the best farm and garden related research hands down. I’m glad to have them in my community. Also excellent veterinarians for complex cases.
Cucumber has always been one of the few things I've always refused eating, its smell is overpowering enough and after all the years since eating and as I was a child when I ate it last I can only describe the flavor as gross, so I've never eaten it. When my nother makes cucumber salad for herself or even just cuts a cucumber I set it accross from where I sit or stand far away as the smell is just too strong. Cucumbers also smell really similar to watermelon, which I'm also not a fan of so I'm more than willing to agree that cucumbers are melons.
I really think there's a genetic cucumber sensitivity similar to the cilantro thing because I've heard similar to this before from other people. But for most people the smell and taste of cucumber is subtle and unobtrusive. It's just such a contrast it makes me curious
@@rae6390 I suspect something similar, I've got an aunt who can't even eat them they make her sick (even picking them out of a salad is not enough, the remaining juice is enough to cause her problems), and my grandmother developed a sensitivity as she aged. I, myself, am not that bad, but I really dislike the taste and almost never eat them. That's three women with varying reactivity within the same maternal line, so... 🤷
@@rae6390 thats a reasonable hypothesis (if a little vague, but you're also not starting a study that needs a strict one) Personally i don't like cucumbers but they taste like almost nothing, i rarely eat them but i know that i dislike the taste but otherwise it isn't strong enough to describe. Similar to most melons, i just genuinely don't care for them as they as basically just sad, slightly sweet water with a gross texture. (I suspect its fundamentally the same issue i have with storebought raspberries which i describe as sad bags of water because i know what the wild ones taste like that are 1/4 the size and actually delicious even when warm and fresh off the plant) However, i love pickles both in texture and flavor, probably its the result of the vinegar fixing all the issues with cucumbers. (When my mom made overnight pickles i only ate the onions and my brother ate the cucumbers which still tasted like cucumber and not pickles)
I've always thought that cucumber tasted like that "middle spot" of watermelon, between the pink flesh and green rind, where it's mostly just white. I feel validated.
@@tommihommi1 what a robust and sound argument. It makes sense to describe cucumber as a melon because they are related to other fruits and veg we call melons and have similar characteristics (vining, high water content). You can't just say it would be silly. But it doesn't matter either way because "melon" is just a word we made up so call whatever you want a melon
Cucumber being a melon makes total sense. Actually I can remember there was a video I watched where people from the late twenties were putting uneaten watermelon rinds in pickle jars and pickling them as if they were cucumbers. Apparently it tastes exactly the same. Are we wasting watermelon rinds? Maybe that should be an episode all on its own.
I’d be curious to know…dryad’s saddle, a wild edible mushroom commonly found growing on logs and trees in many regions across the world, is known to have the distinct smell of watermelon rind, which is distinct but also very close to the smell of cucumber. I’m wondering if there’s a compound common to watermelon, cucumber, and dryad’s saddle?
The flavour is called "farinaceous", and it can refer to tastes ranging from melon rind to cream of wheat. Not exactly sure what causes the flavours but they are very interesting!
Great video, and part of this was of extra interest to me. Firstly, I CANNOT STAND cucumbers! The taste (& smell) is so strong to me that even a single slice will overpower a salad when mixed in and removed. I’ve always wondered why I don’t have the same problem with pickles though, and now I know, so thanks for that!
As a kid, I couldn't understand why people put cucumbers in their salad when they tasted just like melons, and everyone thought I was crazy. As an adult I like them but still think they taste like melons. They go well on a G&T.
People say you're a condescending twat but honestly I just see a person who really enjoys educating others. We need more people like that in this world.
There’s also a vegetable we use a lot in Filipino cuisine that belongs to the same taxonomic family as cucumbers and melons - and they look like cucumbers too. The English name for it: bitter melon. Ah, the tangled webs we weave.
I now know why I dislike certain melons, because they're related to cucumber to which I absolutely loathe DX Zucchini is nice though, especially the fried ones.
Hello Adam👋Ukrainian here My grandma grows this specific type of cucumbers called “rodnichok” [gentle form of “spring” as is fresh water source] and it is absolutely delicious and very different from American and European type. It is similar somewhat to the pickle one you have showed in the video but it tastes almost sweet and hardly bitter even at the base. Noticed that everyone is missing out on this type when I moved to the Netherlands and tried the typical long cucumber :/ Fun trivia : in Ukraine long, dark and spike-less variety is usually referred as “African cucumber” 👀 I wonder why
In México “limonada con pepino” (limeade with cucumber) has become very popular, it’s a quite tasty and refreshing twist on the good old lemonade. You just need to put cucumbers in the blender, and add the purée to the lemonade. (Note that in México “limes” are called “limones”, I have never tried this with the yellow lemons that are more commonly used for lemonade in the USA).
@@nahor88 México is a very diverse country, we have several regional cultures, I have no idea where you may have tasted cucumber Gatorade but I haven’t seen it (I don’t drink Gatorade in any flavor, though).
Hey here’s a question Adam regarding cucumbers. Do (over)ripe cucumbers actually taste nice? If not is that why we don’t eat them ripe? If they actually do taste nice why don’t we eat them more often? Are there cultures that actually DO eat ripe cucumbers?
Someone elsewhere in the comments claimed something along the lines that if a cucumber ripens, the vine thinks it has successfully produced offspring and kills itself to make room for the baby vines. Which would make it much harder to farm in large quantities.
When I was a teenager, I worked at a “pickle receiving station” where farmers brought freshly picked cucumbers to be sorted for size and shipped to a pickle factory. We were up to our ears in cucumbers and ate quite a few of them. They are definitely mini melons a lot less sweet, but same structure. Peel and sprinkle a little sugar and you have a melon.
I made some hot dill pickled cucumbers earlier this month... and it is strange to think of them as a melon. Not too odd however since global cuisine has many savoury fruit preparations. Great video, it really makes me want a cucumber sandwich now.
I recently "discovered" cucamelons at the local farmer's market. I would love to learn more about them. They look like tiny, tiny watermelons and taste like slightly bitter cucumbers. I tried pickling some with limited results so far.
It must be said that while some vegetables and fruits are skimpy on the nutrition front, they’re full of phytonutrients with other health effects. Cucumber is no different.
I feel like cucumbers are very underrated. They're great with some salt on sandwiches, they make great pickles all around the world (from "Polish" dill and garlic mouth-watering-sour ones to the Japanese savory delight) and salads. In Poland (and probably in many places around) we have this thing called 'mizeria' which is basically just cucumbers, salt and sour cream (some people also add ground pepper, herbs, garlic and so on) and it's an amazing side with some meat and potatoes Also, did you know that putting a bit of sugar on a cucumber slice makes it taste almost like a watermelon?
Polish pickles and cured meats are the best in the world IMO. When I had to move away from a Polish deli the German offerings in supermarkets are a pale comparison. (My family hails from Poland and before that Denmark, but sadly my grandfather died before I could try any of his traditional cooking.) I could eat krakowska, pickles, and hot sauce aaaallll day. (In fact I have once or twice!)
The "Baladi" cucumbers we have here in Palestine and the Levant in general are suuuper crunchy and not at all watery and squishy like the greenhouse-grown cucumbers we have when the cucumber season ends. They are soooo flavorsome and you can smell them from a distance. They're also very sweet and are great for pickling. You can easily tell the difference between them and the greenhouse-grown ones because they aren't perfectly cylinder shaped, have a rough skin, and are usually smaller and "harder". I love them so much! Whenever they're in season they are very expensive at first and everyone is buying them and eating them fresh!
i once time heard someone said that " the best part of a cucumber is the worst part of a watermelon " and it, now, does make sense since both come from the same family, just big different in the sugar amount, thank you Adam.
Very intensely informative video thank you! I will buy some of your favorite coffee just because I feel that I need it after that lmao You needa throw some more affiliate stuff in the description bro!
I always wondered why American recipes peeled off most of the skin - I didn’t realise your cucumber varieties were different! I am feeling somewhat validated about the melon thing though - after I ate a slightly un-ripe honeydew as a kid, I swore it tasted identical to cucumber. A bunch of adults around me insisted cucumber is a squash not a melon. Take that, parents of the other kids! Though make that another strike against my crummy mother’s overestimated nutrition knowledge - cucumber was one of the main “vegetables” she pushed, as an alternative to brassicas. Oh dear. Talk about two ends of the spectrum!
Hey Adam! I'm a huge fan of your work, even though there's a few recipes of yours I'm not a big fan of. I seem to have chronic canker sores which makes eating very acidic meals a nightmare. As for your love of acidity, why don't we look for meals that are basic, or high in pH? Are there just naturally not many high pH edible substances? Is it a taste that unlike acidity nobody really likes?
There's this thing the older people in my house used to do with cucumbers to reduce their bitterness. They would cut a small part off the top and rub the two sections together, releasing a white foam and then rinse and repeat. I couldn't find much info online but maybe a future video experiment?
A friend showed me that trick years ago. You can get a pretty sizable blob of bitter stuff doing that. I figured some kind of capillary suction happening on the skin, but honestly I don't know why/where it comes from for sure. ";^)
We bought cucumber seeds for our garden one year and for a little while I thought we were going to harvest cucumbers, they looked the same-until they turned into very recognizable cantaloupe lol. Somebody messed up at the seed factory 😂
Every time Adam puts out a knowledge dumping video like this, I know I'm going to enjoy it. It's legitimately like a classroom experience, with new vocabulary words, lots of term papers, some really funny facts (explosions!), and a great deal of surprisingly fascinating information. He knows how to put on an entertaining lecture and it shows. Melons! Who knew? Oh wait...HE did.
I've always had a bit of nausea when eating cucumber or watermelon after a large meal and no one I told believed me because of the apparent difference between cucumbers or watermelons. Knowing they're related makes me think there might've been something to it that wasn't just in my head (although perhaps it's something as simple as their water content).
I've always eaten cucumbers with the skin on, though most of the time they were cucumbers my dad grew. I've never thought that they were difficult to eat. Despite him growing them every year I've never seen thorns on them. Maybe a different variety? Maybe I'm just unobservant. I dunno.
I've grown gherkins in my garden and while they definitely had noticeable spikes, they could be brushed off easily and probably just eaten if the texture didn't bother you. As with all things cultivated, we've minimised the aspects that inconvenience and maximise those which satisfy.
We pickle the yellow cucumbers too. First we core them to remove the bitterness and pickle them in various ways: Ginger pickles, Polish dills, Cajun hot, Kosher dills, garlic habanero (my favorites), and sweet Reapers. The various peppers are used for flavor, not for extreme heat, though if you eat 3 or 4 pickles in a row you'll definitely feel it. No matter the variety, we make and eat ~100 jars each year.
Cucumber taste exactly like watermelon to me. I guess it's that compound that I'm extremely sensitive to. I can taste residual cucumbers if I ask for a salad at a restaurant without cucumbers and they just plucked them out. Even over the dressing, I can still taste watermelon. I really don't like watermelon, but I can dill with pickles. 🤪
People calling cucumbers "crunchy water" always makes me feel crazy because to me, cucumber has a very prominent, bitter flavor that makes them unpalatable unless they're in a strong sauce like tzatziki. It's also the reason that I can't stand cucumber pickles and prefer things like pickled radishes. The flavors and textures are a lot more pleasant.
@@SviatoslavDamaschin I live in Europe and I feel the exact same way as OP. Absolutely hate the "sharp," bitter taste of cucumbers. Also hate melons for the same reason.
Not sure if they are native, but in Texas/Mexico we have wild cucumbers that you can forage (Mexican Gherkins/Creeping Cucumber). They look just like tiny watermelons and taste great! Just don't eat one after they turn black! (becomes a potent laxative)
I have a feeling we’re about to see another 2-3 cucumber based recipes in a row now and I’m all for it!
Let's bet one of them will be some version of asian cucumber salad.
I hope he does "cold cucumber soup." It's cool and refreshing, and doesn't require cooking so it won't add extra heat to a house on hot days.
At a place I worked we would hire a couple J1 people during the summer. One of them was from Eastern Europe and he brought a container of it for lunch a couple times. I remember it was pretty much cucumbers, dill, garlic, lemon/lime, good olive oil, and yogurt. He made his own yogurt and that could be another reason it tasted so good. He said Greek yogurt would work if you don't have homemade.
I really love these video formats. One more scientifique video and then 1-2 recipes about the concept/food product. You feel like you don't only know how to make the recipe you also know why it works!
@@wavenp It's really nice, I'm sure the info stuff comes up while getting the dish planned (or at least sought out). It's basically a few-for-one in terms of video production and that's the kind of efficiency I can get behind, haha. Plus it's more great content for viewers!
Or pickled zucchinis.
Seedless English cucumbers you buy in the store are "parthenocarpic"- they develop fruit without requiring pollination. This is so they can be grown in an enclosed space without using so much pesticides. This has a convenient side effect of the seeds not developing, so long as you avoid it getting pollinated by some other cucumber (which would cause it to form seeds normally).
The "seeds" you see in an english cuke are just the remnants of where the seeds would form- the shell, basically.
My German eyes were quite surprised to see that the US seems to be used to a very different kind of cucumber than we Europeans. As far as I can tell we also don't really have such a strong connection to them being cool, although "fresh tasting" is definitely a thing. The German name is also kind of cute for them: Schlangengurke (snake cucumber). Luckily I've never been bitten so far!
Gurke is also where the English word gherkin comes from. It's a horribly mangled form of the plural "Gurken".
@@fonkbadonk5370 do you also have problems to pronounce words like Schadenfreude without trying to sound like a foreigner
@@fonkbadonk5370 horribly mangled? It's just spelled differently, what a weird take.
shame they then wrap them in plastic basically undoing the damage they spared the enviroment by not using pesticides
@@danm8004 The original word has no phonemes that don't exist in English, and it's using the plural for singular. I'd call that at least moderately mangled. Alternative that would sound almost identical to the German one: Goorkeh.
The white part of water melon also taste similar to cucumber. We used to eat the red part as fruit and thin slice the white part for stir fry. Extra veggie for no cost
Fascinating. Makes a ton of sense.
Nice way to reduce waste!
I eat watermelon all the down to the green and when I do, my wife looks at me like I just murdered a baby seal.
Yooooo, I never noticed until reading this I eat some of the white part and it surely does!
In fact, I just realized that cucumbers might be melons a couple of days ago when trying to eat what I can only assume was an under-ripe or perhaps under-watered cucumber. The outer 2/3 of the flesh was pale and chewy, with a muted flavor. It wasn't appealing, but I realized partway through it that the pale flesh tasted like a melon with no sweetness, or perhaps the pale flesh of a watermelon.
@@sabatino1977 I'm not personally a huge fan of watermelon rinds (or watermelon and cucumbers in general, which is interesting considering i didnt know they were so similar at all), but definitely am not disgusted to the point I'd compare it to seal clubbing haha.
I usually just dice em up along with any other compostables i have and throw em in the garden planter out front instead of tossing em in the trash, the earthworms seem to enjoy em greatly.
Today I learned, as a 34 year old, whos parents had a ranch and grew cucumbers, that ripe cucumbers would turn yellow instead of shrivelled up green raisins. Also why some cucumbers are bitter.
Thank you Adam you rock.
everyone always look at me like im insane when i say cucumber is one of my favorite fruits. easy to grow, tasty, can be used in refreshing drinks or savory dishes or pickled.....whats not to like?
tasty, cool and crunchy, I mean what's not to like
I used to often put them on my burger tho the very hot meat would instantly make the cucumbers super warm and a bit less fresh
eating a heated cucumber is so incredibly different and odd
I still like both tho .
I've called out watermelons as excessively large cucumbers for years now; glad to see some confirmation that the association isn't just in my head.
Yes!! Me too!
Try adding sugar to a couple of cucumber slices, it tastes just like watermelon.
Well now you should slice watermelon and put it on sandwiches
You can cook the rind of watermelon and it taste like a cooked cucumber.
The best part of a cucumber is the worst part of a watermelon
I've thought that cucumbers taste like watermelon rind for years, now it finally makes sense. What a lovely vid, thank you!
Yup! I once made a "salad" of diced cucumber with apple, and the combination tasted almost exactly like watermelon. It was kind of a lightbulb moment for me and I still make it occasionally when I'm craving watermelon but it's not in season/too expensive/not available.
Cukes and watermelon rind are both excellent substrates for vinegar style pickles. I don't know if lactic acid fermentation works on rinds, since my dad didn't practice that and I am too lazy.
Now there's a good topic for another video: Do watermelon rinds have any toxicity? I was always told it's bad for you to eat too far into the rind, but I sometimes do anyway when I'm especially enjoying a melon and haven't noticed it causing me any problems.
@@RosesAndIvy I imagine the alchemists must have spent years trying to figure out how to combine cucumbers and apples in order to make a watermelon.
I never thought about but yeah, you're right it does taste a cucumber lol.
Funny enough, cucumbers are called 青瓜 in Chinese - the latter character "瓜" meaning "melon" (and the former, "青", meaning "green"). This made me realise how English speakers don't necessarily correlate cucumbers with melons, whilst I just do it so subconsciously that I didn't notice until now.
We literally call it "mouse melon" because it's a melon that looks like a mouse. Or "climbing melon" because it's a vine that climbs.
Oh that's interesting. We call cumcumbers 黄瓜, or "yellow melon" because they turn yellow when they are ripe like Adam shows in the video.
Both 青瓜 and 黄瓜 are correct.
青瓜 in Cantonese, 黄瓜 in Mandarin.
@@davehu8829 I call cucumber 青瓜 in both Mandarin and Cantonese.
@@penguinpingu3807 whereas I call cucumber 黄瓜 in both mandarin and Cantonese! Learn something new every day...
A week or two ago my in-laws showed me that they were growing “Cucumelons,” little round cucumbers that tasted a lot like the rind of a watermelon. That makes sense now knowing that cucumbers are just melons by another name.
Also, researchers totally missed out by not calling “cucumber aldehyde” something catchy like “cucumbaldehyde.”
We have always made sure not to plant cucumbers anywhere near melon.... the tastes get mixed up if the vine intertwines
@@goodolearkygal5746 The taste will not be affected by proximity to melons.
COCOMELON???
'Cucumber Aldehyde" you mean the guy who acts in that Dr.Strange movies?
Theyre also known as Mexican Sour Cucumbers or Mouse Cucumbers. Our 1 plant produced like 200 of them in a season, nuts.
It's so weird... I was JUST thinking this the other day when I was eating cucumber on it's own while chopping it for a salad, and the skin suddenly tasted oddly familiar. Maybe it was because the cucumber was not as ripe as usual, but after chewing on the skin and the part right under the skin a bit more carefully, I realized the taste was that of the dissatisfaction you get when eating a watermelon and you eat the white part next to the skin. It's like when you don't have any red part of a watermelon left and you go back to gnaw on the pink-white bits but it ends up tasting more like the white part, and that's what it tasted like to eat this cucumber skin... that's when I realized the seeds in the middle had the same shape as with a watermelon except the color and the hardness... really interesting to see this now and the science of it
Just wanted to say your videos got my girlfriend and I to start cooking together and it’s so much fun. I love educational/informative videos and love how you take a scientific approach to cooking, it makes it way easier for me to get interested in what’s going on. Much love from Atlanta!
Adam is the best in educational content for cooking nerds!
Yes, he’s the reason I started cooking more and experimenting. Now I also follow other cooking shows like Ethan C, Food Wishes and this Mexican grandmother (de mi rancho).
I wonder if the burp could be from ethylene gas. When I was a radiology fellow, one of my professors used watermelons to simulate the human head for CT research and found that even uncut watermelons had gas collections in them. (Hence the hollow thump on a ripe melon.) He had the gas analyzed by a chemist and it was found to be ethylene, the same gas used to ripen fruit artificially. Maybe cucumbers also have enough dissolved ethylene to cause some people to burp.
ur so smart
You would have to eat a whole bunch of cucumbers though!
I would assume the reason there is gas in the watermelon is that originally the where somewhat hollow before they were bred to be more or less full (you can see this in older paintings of watermelons). Maybe leaving behind smaller gaps in the flesh for the ethylene; which, correct me if I’m wrong, a lot of fruits produce naturally as well in order to ripen their fellow fruits near them on the plant. All this to say, I don’t know if cucumber have or had any cavities in them before being bred into their current form that could trap ethylene.
@@danielwilson6669 ethylene gas is a plant hormone that triggers the ripening genes and the maximum production is just before the ripening.
When I learned that such a simple compound was responsible for that when I read my Organic Chem book I found that to be the neatest thing. I expected something complicated, but instead got something wonderfully simple, that does a lot. You made a wonderful connection there Daryl, and you're probably right on the money.
If you look closely at the English cucumber you sliced, you’ll see the endocarps are hollow, AKA seedless. Some cucumbers have an allele for persistence, meaning they can ripen fruit without pollination. Those varieties are called “parthenocarpic.” My favorite variety is Beit Alpha. It will persist without pollination, will be seedless if unpollinated, is burpless and insanely crisp. Very productive and heat tolerant, too.
*Never* allow a cucumber to ripen on the vine, not even once. If a single cucumber matures and becomes yellow, the vine will assume it successfully produced mature seed and will end its lifecycle, i.e. die back. Cucumbers will produce more fruit if you pick them more. Pick them early and often when the fruits are small, because the plant will panic and kick into overdrive, desperately producing as many fruits as possible out of fear than it won’t produce mature seed before season’s end. The goal of a cucumber plant is to reproduce, so if you prevent it from producing ripe fruit, it’ll keep cranking out fruits like crazy!
It’s interesting how many plants work like that, if you pull their fruit or trim their flowers, they try extra hard and you can get the same output as you’d need 10 plants for otherwise. It makes sense when you figure they evolved in an environment where they couldn’t control which animals tried to eat them I suppose.
I'm a bit sad for the panicked plant, but I will take your advice x')
I appreciated your video on the subject. Our cucs went wild this year and my husband brought in a large yellow one and I said, "OH NO!"
@@joyful_tanya I'm glad to hear you had success. It's inevitable that we all eventually will miss a cucumber, and something will turn yellow. They hide very well. I always recommend starting new seedlings every 4-6 weeks to replace the existing plants, because it's only a matter of time until we either miss a cuke and they die back, or the cucumber plants themselves call it quits. They don't live long and aren't meant to survive all spring and summer into fall.
@@TheMillennialGardener thank you! We planted late here in zone 5b because of freezing temperatures at night well into May. We also have a relatively small garden area. I appreciate your advice! I learn new things every garden season! This year we rescued an eggplant seedling rolling around the parking lot of the hardware store. We brought it home and planted it. It's done beautifully and we learned that we like eggplant. It will definitely be something we plant again. 😁
The Korean melon, also called the Oriental melon, is noticeably less sweet than melons like cantaloupes and have been described as a cross between cucumbers and (sweet) melons. It is called chamoe (참외) in Korean, which means "true cucumber", oe (외, one syllable) being a contraction of oi (오이, two syllables), Korean for cucumber.
Interestingly, in the southern and eastern dialects, the Korean melon is called oe and the cucumber is called muroe (물외) meaning "water oe". So oi/oe must have originally referred to both cucumbers and Korean melons before the need arose to differentiate them. Standard Korean decided that oi/oe without an adjective referred to cucumbers, while these dialects decided that it should refer to Korean melons.
Western melons are unimaginatively called mellon (멜론) in Korean, not something like yang-oe (양외) "Western oe" as one might expect. Also, watermelons are called subak (수박) or "water gourd", so we don't seem to use oi/oe for anything other than cucumbers and Korean melons.
Most cucumbers seen in markets are long and a bit narrow, but wild cucumbers are small, oval shaped, and absolutely full of spikes. Strangely, I found a wild cucumber growing in eastern Washington State last summer. The fruit was growing from a vine that had stretched and wrapped it's way up a 20ft tree from the side of a small river. I only managed to grab the fruit because I had noticed it from the bridge I stood on next to the tree. I kept it and still have it, although it's completely dried. There are even some seeds inside. If you find those hidden gems growing in the forest, or even on the side of the road, please don't eat them. They're toxic.
The one bit (well, maybe two) you missed is that hot weather increases bitterness. A LOT. So "pickling cucumbers" might be fine for fresh eating early in the season and inedible later. And some varieties simply don't get bitter. I've been growing heirloom lemon cucumbers for 20 years for this reason. Even in the worst heat of summer they are still good fresh.
Just got myself some lemon cucumber seeds, and I live in inland Australia -- good to hear they cope well with the heat!
I've never thought of a cucumber as a melon, but after he said that it was I thought "oh, yeah, duh". A bit of a mind blow
I currently have both at home, a cucumber and a watermelon.
If you look at them, even the seeds of the cucumber are identical in shape, maybe even taste, to the watermelon.
@@Franky_Sthein I know right, it's weird
They're not though. They're related to but are not themselves melons.
@@hypotheticaltapeworm Depends on what definition you're using for "melon"
@@WanderTheNomad Scientific or culinary? No wait, not really, because cucumbers are often treated as vegetables while melons are exclusively seen as fruit. The two aren't always compared either. So if you're in fantasy land and lie about what things are, then sure. Cucumbers are melons depending on what "definition" you use. Oblige me with your alternative facts, Ms. Conway.
In Turkey, when its season, we eat unripe melons (called "kelek"), which tastes pretty much like cucumber. Also check out "acur" variety, it is pretty refreshing snack during summer.
In southern Italy too some melon varieties (Carosello and Barattiere) are eaten green in salads. They have a great flavor, without bitterness and just a hint of melon sweetness.
Turkey's got a lot of tiny cucumbers as well
As a reverse we sometimes ate cucumbers with a bit of sugar when I was a kid and it tasted a lot like most melons
In Hungary, we conserve unripe melon using a vinegar solution (pickling them), just like pickles or baby onions. They are fantastic.
I think they're called Armenian cucumber in English.
In Mexico we make fruit flavoured water, and cucumber water, which always includes lime juice, tastes exactly like watermelon water with lime juice, which made it so clear to me that cucumbers are melons. Even bland or just non sweet watermelons just taste a lot like cucumber
In Swedish an old word for zucchini is stekgurka, meaning fry cucumber, a cucumber you fry instead of eating raw. Because of that I always thought they were closely related.
It was also interesting to learn that the standard cucumber you buy in the grocery store is another variety in the US than in Sweden. Now I understand why so many recipies call for the to me unnecessary pealing.
I also thought "burpless" was a marketing gimmick, until last fall, our neighbors brought us a bunch of cucumbers they had grown... We made some cucumber salad with some rice wine vinegar, and some herbs... and I proceeded to burp repeatedly for hours. Always tasting the cucumbers. It wasn't unpleasant, aside from belching nonstop.
"Cucumbers are actually melons" has been one of my go-to fun facts for a while now. They're the oops, all rind watermelon.
There's a mini cucumber variety called mouse melon. They are like normal cucumbers, but maybe a little bit sweeter. This was when I first realized that melons are pretty similar to cucumbers.
The cucumber you call "English cucumber" is called "Dutch cucumber" in Spain and "Japanese cucumber" in Brazil. I don't believe we will ever know where it is really from.
Well Adam said that cucumbers come from India, so we know where it started and ended, just not where it went in between.
In Hungary, "snake cucumber".
In Australia its called a "Continental cucumber".
The Dutch simply call it a cucumber. The other types are uncommon.
Mine are "Grocery Store Cucumbers".
That's where they're from.
It really shows how much time, effort, work and research goes into producing your videos. I gladly appreciate it. You make some of the best videos on this platform.
As a child, my Slavic grandmother would often serve me fresh sliced cucumbers from her garden in vinegar with a bit of sugar.
Total comfort food! 🥰
She also made the best pickles ever and her Borscht had no equal that I’ve ever found. 😋😋
Yep, it's a melon, in Chinese cucumbers are called 黄瓜, where the character 瓜 means melon, and the character 黄 means yellow, so the literal translation would be "yellow melon" (when ripe).
We also boil "old cucumber" soup, where yellow, ripe and wrinkled cucumbers are used.
i was just about to comment this XD
This man reads my mind. Had a whole discussion with my kids yesterday about what cucumbers, melons, gourds, et al are in botanical terms.
I was eating a cold pasta salad with cucumber chunks in it as I watched this. When the topic of "Are cucumbers cold?" came up I distinctly took some bites of pasta and cucumber separately and noticed, yeah, this cucumber feels WAY colder to eat and now I know why. Love that serendipity
I have been growing a variety my grandmother grew when I was a child this season. They are called ‘white wonder’ and are white or pale green. They seem to be milder than the green varieties and we have made both vinegar pickles and fermented pickles out of them. Thanks for the information about them. I didn’t know where they belonged but it makes sense based on what I know about them.
I'll never stop being impressed on how seamlessly he inserts the ads in his videos. I don't even want to skip, because they somehow feel an essential part of the video.
Regarding cucumber "burping" there's another theory behind this, attributing the effect mainly to air swallowing during ingestion. Because the thing is so crunchy yet slippery inside the mouth, many people tend to swallow it before it's thoroughly crushed between the teeth and the larger pieces mixed with saliva are trapping more air bubbles than normal. I hared this in med school some 20 years ago and I have no idea if there's any published study behind it or not.
I'm from Denmark and had never heard of the cucumber burping thing. I've lived in France and the UK, and have friends from many European countries. A quick internet search shows that the only Danish language mentions of cucumbers and burps are in machine translated American texts. I wonder if it's a (food) cultural thing.
I can totally believe that. I tend to get the burps from watermelon, but only if I eat it too quickly. I've always attributed it to swallowing air as I ate.
I get the same burps when I eat cucumbers, cantaloupe, or honeydew. Watermelon used to be a problem, too, but for some reason I can eat that now. Cucumbers are less of a problem if I peel and de-seed them. "American" cantaloupes are a problem, but "Italian" cantaloupes are no problem at all.
2:25 Edible fruits are an adaptation to seed dispersal by animals. Therefore, the high water content in the fruits of the _Cucumis_ genus is probably an adaptation to a more efficient seed dispersal in hot climates (where drinkable water can be often scarce or hard to find) rather than to seed germination.
So basically it's for the seeds, but with more steps
It could also be both. Evolution doesnt really have a single purpose when evolving new attributes in a species, so I wouldnt be surprised theres multiple evolutionary advantages at work here.
That's probably only one factor, I also think of the fruit as the germination bed for nutrients the seed will need to sprout, if not eaten.
But then again, plants can never tell what it is we'll put into our mouths for fun next, can they?
@@randomsandwichian, but if the fruit isn’t eaten, the seed(s) will hardly be dispersed. Hence the adaptation to produce edible fruits to be eaten by animals.
It's always been wild to me when people say that cucumbers don't taste like anything. I find them strongly flavored, and frankly not that agreeable unless prepared with some sort of acid (as in pickles, tzatziki, or raita).
I’m 98% sure it a genetic thing, like cilantro = soap. I have the same issue with cucumbers. It ruins a dish for me.
Thankfully, i dont have the cilantro thing.
@@Azubi_Meatball4349 did you do any research into that, or are you just guessing and saying 98% sure?
@@geraldsimpson1372 it's a TH-cam comment not a PhD thesis
@@geraldsimpson1372 i saw some sort of video a few years ago that said this, but im not 100% sure because i dont know the source for their claims
@@rambi1072 yea but he says he's 98% sure it's genetic, I'm just curious if he even looked into it first before saying he was so sure
Funnily enough we've been growing Cucumbers for the first time (literally called 'Burpless' such and such variety) and have just started to harvest them in the past week or so. Two things I noticed as a novice grower were the little spikes all over them, and the unmistakable flavour of watermelon. They are really quite sweet, virtually no bitter notes you usually associate with store bought Cucumber. I even said to my wife 'hey I guess they are a kind of melon'. My wife is Polish and tells me the smaller lumpy variety they use in their dill brined 'Ogorki Kiszone' are what they call Field Cucumbers which grow along the ground rather than as climbers.
That was probably the most smooth Segway to a sponsor I’ve ever seen in a video. Props to you man, that’s impressive
11:15 Love it when science finds out the reason for traditional food preparation practices (such as choosing especially the small ones for pickling). Edit: having googled kosher dill pickles, they do seem as the same that they make in every Slavic (and Slavic-influenced) food culture. If so, they are delicious, salty, tart, refreshing on a hot summer day and/or served with Hungarian potato sauce pasta.
"In the future, entertainment will be randomly generated"
-Some cucumber
WEED EATER
I've never understood how anyone can say cucumbers are watery or tasteless. To me the have THE MOST POWERFUL FLAVOR of anything I've ever eaten in my 29 years of life.
Maybe I'm particularly sensitive to some of those compounds Adam mentioned, because to me cucumbers (and celery too) are overwhelmingly pungent! Like to the point where I can barely even identify other ingredients in a salad, sandwich, or sauce that contains cucumber.
8:06 - I've got to say, I've never even seen *those* at the grocery store. The only cucumbers I see, and I tend to buy one every week, is much longer and thinner, and wrapped in plastic for some reason.
Edit: of course I only needed to wait 30 seconds.
The English/seedless cucumbers have a thinner skin and aren't waxed like the regular cucumbers, so they get wrapped in plastic to protect them.
Lmao, I love how the video then talks about them 30 seconds after
By far the content creator with the smoothest transitions between, well, content and ads... They should be paying you more, Adam.
As a British viewer I was quite surprised to see what American cucumbers are like. Sometimes I skin an English/Seedless/burpless/Asian/long cucumber and use the skin as an addition to pulled pork and other similar dishes. The concentration of flavour and the firm texture is great, and the fact that this variety is so long and thin you can get quite a lot for not very much work. The only problem is figuring out what to do with the rest of the cucumber.
I only discovered English cucumbers a few years ago, and there's no going back-the English variety is way better.
Eat the rest of the cucumber
Thanks, this helps explain why I've always like pickles but have generally disliked cucumbers. It must be the cucurbitacins in it as I'm very sensitive to bitter things. This reminds me, if you are looking for topic ideas, it'd be interesting to learn more about what being a "super taster" means and the differences in types of super tasting.
Just out of curiosity about super tasters, do you like chocolate?
@@oxybrightdark8765 I'm a big fan of chocolate but absolutely hate coffee.
@@SILVERF0X13 are you American?
@@steph_dreams Yup
@@SILVERF0X13 makes a lot of sense, you all want to be super at something. Newsflash, you are not a perfect and unique snowflake, you're simply a meat and bone mech being piloted by a smooth brain
Here in Mexico we have a classic "from grandma" method of removing the bitterness of a cucumber: slice the very tip of a cucumber, then start grinding the cut parts against each other. If done well, a while foam forms in the lip of the cut.
My partner and I are always amazed by your segues into ad reads. Holy cow, such a smooth operator!
The ending was so satisfying. From the point you showed they turned orange/yellow I was sad you didnt show/tell us what its like eating one. So thank you for easing my mind at the last second
I’m so happy to hear that the aldehyde is also in watermelon. I taste similar bites between the two but it seems like that is not the norm when I mention it
Sometimes, especially when the watermelon is not very sweet it tastes very much like cucumbers.
They absolutely taste alike. I can't stand either of them.
Apparently you can reduce the bitterness by cutting off the ends and rubbing them on the rest of the melon. Not sure how/if it works but it's common in India (where I guess the native varieties are more bitter)
works great ! exactly as you said, just cut the ends and rub the cut parts, some kind of thick foam should form, that's where the bitterness is, just do it until that foam stops forming, repeat on the other end and you're good
Interesting to hear English cucumbers are marketed as burpless. I'm from the UK and get excess burps from cucumbers (and most non pickled cucumbers I've ever eaten have been English cucumbers), I can mitigate it somewhat by removing the seeds but even then too much cucmber is guaranteed to make me burp
Cucumbers have a lot of air pockets, like a sponge.
One thing that might contribute to (or stem from) cucumber's 'coolness' is that in pre-modern Western medicine cucumber seeds were one of the 'four greater cold seeds' used in traditional remedies.
Western medicine before the enlightenment had many parallels with what I see in Traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine, with hot, cold etc. (and probably borrowed a lot from India)
NCSU (who you referenced at least twice here) has the best farm and garden related research hands down. I’m glad to have them in my community. Also excellent veterinarians for complex cases.
Cucumber has always been one of the few things I've always refused eating, its smell is overpowering enough and after all the years since eating and as I was a child when I ate it last I can only describe the flavor as gross, so I've never eaten it. When my nother makes cucumber salad for herself or even just cuts a cucumber I set it accross from where I sit or stand far away as the smell is just too strong. Cucumbers also smell really similar to watermelon, which I'm also not a fan of so I'm more than willing to agree that cucumbers are melons.
Agreed.
Same!
I really think there's a genetic cucumber sensitivity similar to the cilantro thing because I've heard similar to this before from other people. But for most people the smell and taste of cucumber is subtle and unobtrusive. It's just such a contrast it makes me curious
@@rae6390 I suspect something similar, I've got an aunt who can't even eat them they make her sick (even picking them out of a salad is not enough, the remaining juice is enough to cause her problems), and my grandmother developed a sensitivity as she aged. I, myself, am not that bad, but I really dislike the taste and almost never eat them. That's three women with varying reactivity within the same maternal line, so... 🤷
@@rae6390 thats a reasonable hypothesis (if a little vague, but you're also not starting a study that needs a strict one)
Personally i don't like cucumbers but they taste like almost nothing, i rarely eat them but i know that i dislike the taste but otherwise it isn't strong enough to describe. Similar to most melons, i just genuinely don't care for them as they as basically just sad, slightly sweet water with a gross texture. (I suspect its fundamentally the same issue i have with storebought raspberries which i describe as sad bags of water because i know what the wild ones taste like that are 1/4 the size and actually delicious even when warm and fresh off the plant)
However, i love pickles both in texture and flavor, probably its the result of the vinegar fixing all the issues with cucumbers. (When my mom made overnight pickles i only ate the onions and my brother ate the cucumbers which still tasted like cucumber and not pickles)
I love how weird Adam is willing to be these days. Dude just sticks a thermometer in a cucumber likes it's another Tuesday for him.
That's what he does on Tuesdays, goes round his neighborhoods gardens sta.bbing his thermometer in veges, "FOR SCIENcE!" he screams each time 🤣
For that cucumber, the day Adam Ragusea stabbed it with a thermometer was the most important day of its life. But for Adam, it was Tuesday.
I've always thought that cucumber tasted like that "middle spot" of watermelon, between the pink flesh and green rind, where it's mostly just white. I feel validated.
There was a trend a bit ago on tiktok where you dipped cucumber in sugar and it would taste like watermelon
Water Melons aren't melons, they're a different genus. And Cucumbers aren't melons, that would be silly.
@@tommihommi1 that's not at all what was being said
@@tommihommi1 what a robust and sound argument. It makes sense to describe cucumber as a melon because they are related to other fruits and veg we call melons and have similar characteristics (vining, high water content). You can't just say it would be silly. But it doesn't matter either way because "melon" is just a word we made up so call whatever you want a melon
I've noticed when the watermelon is not very sweet, it is basically cucumber.
As kids we would dip cucumbers in sugar so I always saw the flavour as versatile. It may sound odd but it's a lovely, crunchy treat
Cucumber being a melon makes total sense. Actually I can remember there was a video I watched where people from the late twenties were putting uneaten watermelon rinds in pickle jars and pickling them as if they were cucumbers. Apparently it tastes exactly the same. Are we wasting watermelon rinds? Maybe that should be an episode all on its own.
I never thought I would really enjoy a CaveMan teaching me everything there is to know about cucumbers
I’d be curious to know…dryad’s saddle, a wild edible mushroom commonly found growing on logs and trees in many regions across the world, is known to have the distinct smell of watermelon rind, which is distinct but also very close to the smell of cucumber. I’m wondering if there’s a compound common to watermelon, cucumber, and dryad’s saddle?
That would be cool to research!
Yes, and the scientific name is “Awesomesauce”.
The flavour is called "farinaceous", and it can refer to tastes ranging from melon rind to cream of wheat. Not exactly sure what causes the flavours but they are very interesting!
Great video, and part of this was of extra interest to me. Firstly, I CANNOT STAND cucumbers! The taste (& smell) is so strong to me that even a single slice will overpower a salad when mixed in and removed. I’ve always wondered why I don’t have the same problem with pickles though, and now I know, so thanks for that!
As a kid, I couldn't understand why people put cucumbers in their salad when they tasted just like melons, and everyone thought I was crazy. As an adult I like them but still think they taste like melons. They go well on a G&T.
People say you're a condescending twat but honestly I just see a person who really enjoys educating others. We need more people like that in this world.
There’s also a vegetable we use a lot in Filipino cuisine that belongs to the same taxonomic family as cucumbers and melons - and they look like cucumbers too. The English name for it: bitter melon.
Ah, the tangled webs we weave.
Ooh we have those in south Asia too! It's normally cooked stuffed with spices, other vegetables, and/or minced meat
Interestingly, in Chinese cucumbers are known as 黄瓜 (yellow melon)
Today I learnt that I'm lucky my cucumbers are English.
its almost midnight and i learned way too much about cucumbers than needed. thanks
I now know why I dislike certain melons, because they're related to cucumber to which I absolutely loathe DX
Zucchini is nice though, especially the fried ones.
Hello Adam👋Ukrainian here
My grandma grows this specific type of cucumbers called “rodnichok” [gentle form of “spring” as is fresh water source] and it is absolutely delicious and very different from American and European type. It is similar somewhat to the pickle one you have showed in the video but it tastes almost sweet and hardly bitter even at the base.
Noticed that everyone is missing out on this type when I moved to the Netherlands and tried the typical long cucumber :/
Fun trivia : in Ukraine long, dark and spike-less variety is usually referred as “African cucumber” 👀 I wonder why
In México “limonada con pepino” (limeade with cucumber) has become very popular, it’s a quite tasty and refreshing twist on the good old lemonade. You just need to put cucumbers in the blender, and add the purée to the lemonade.
(Note that in México “limes” are called “limones”, I have never tried this with the yellow lemons that are more commonly used for lemonade in the USA).
I'm sure that prolly tastes good, but your culture also came up with "Cucumber flavored gatorade", which is DISGUSTING LOL.
@@nahor88 México is a very diverse country, we have several regional cultures, I have no idea where you may have tasted cucumber Gatorade but I haven’t seen it (I don’t drink Gatorade in any flavor, though).
@@FernandoJRodriguezFernandoJRM That sounds like a Chicano thing
@@k.umquat8604 you’re confusing your Latino demographics. I’m speaking of MEXICO, not of Mexican-Americans in the USA.
@@FernandoJRodriguezFernandoJRM I was talking about what nahor88b said, "cucumber flavored gatorade"
Hey here’s a question Adam regarding cucumbers. Do (over)ripe cucumbers actually taste nice? If not is that why we don’t eat them ripe? If they actually do taste nice why don’t we eat them more often? Are there cultures that actually DO eat ripe cucumbers?
Here's my guess: They'd taste slightly sweeter, certainly more 'ripe' but lose a lot of firmness and become quite mushy.
@@HavokTheorem He eats one in the video, apparently it's more bitter.
The seeds are bigger/firmer and less appealing
Someone elsewhere in the comments claimed something along the lines that if a cucumber ripens, the vine thinks it has successfully produced offspring and kills itself to make room for the baby vines. Which would make it much harder to farm in large quantities.
When I was a teenager, I worked at a “pickle receiving station” where farmers brought freshly picked cucumbers to be sorted for size and shipped to a pickle factory. We were up to our ears in cucumbers and ate quite a few of them. They are definitely mini melons a lot less sweet, but same structure. Peel and sprinkle a little sugar and you have a melon.
I would've never imagined a "pickle receiving station" was a thing
I made some hot dill pickled cucumbers earlier this month... and it is strange to think of them as a melon. Not too odd however since global cuisine has many savoury fruit preparations. Great video, it really makes me want a cucumber sandwich now.
I recently "discovered" cucamelons at the local farmer's market. I would love to learn more about them. They look like tiny, tiny watermelons and taste like slightly bitter cucumbers.
I tried pickling some with limited results so far.
Someone always does that here by accident lol. I'm glad someone likes them
It must be said that while some vegetables and fruits are skimpy on the nutrition front, they’re full of phytonutrients with other health effects. Cucumber is no different.
I feel like cucumbers are very underrated. They're great with some salt on sandwiches, they make great pickles all around the world (from "Polish" dill and garlic mouth-watering-sour ones to the Japanese savory delight) and salads. In Poland (and probably in many places around) we have this thing called 'mizeria' which is basically just cucumbers, salt and sour cream (some people also add ground pepper, herbs, garlic and so on) and it's an amazing side with some meat and potatoes
Also, did you know that putting a bit of sugar on a cucumber slice makes it taste almost like a watermelon?
Polish pickles and cured meats are the best in the world IMO. When I had to move away from a Polish deli the German offerings in supermarkets are a pale comparison. (My family hails from Poland and before that Denmark, but sadly my grandfather died before I could try any of his traditional cooking.) I could eat krakowska, pickles, and hot sauce aaaallll day. (In fact I have once or twice!)
The "Baladi" cucumbers we have here in Palestine and the Levant in general are suuuper crunchy and not at all watery and squishy like the greenhouse-grown cucumbers we have when the cucumber season ends. They are soooo flavorsome and you can smell them from a distance. They're also very sweet and are great for pickling. You can easily tell the difference between them and the greenhouse-grown ones because they aren't perfectly cylinder shaped, have a rough skin, and are usually smaller and "harder". I love them so much! Whenever they're in season they are very expensive at first and everyone is buying them and eating them fresh!
i once time heard someone said that " the best part of a cucumber is the worst part of a watermelon " and it, now, does make sense since both come from the same family, just big different in the sugar amount, thank you Adam.
Very intensely informative video thank you! I will buy some of your favorite coffee just because I feel that I need it after that lmao
You needa throw some more affiliate stuff in the description bro!
I always wondered why American recipes peeled off most of the skin - I didn’t realise your cucumber varieties were different!
I am feeling somewhat validated about the melon thing though - after I ate a slightly un-ripe honeydew as a kid, I swore it tasted identical to cucumber. A bunch of adults around me insisted cucumber is a squash not a melon. Take that, parents of the other kids!
Though make that another strike against my crummy mother’s overestimated nutrition knowledge - cucumber was one of the main “vegetables” she pushed, as an alternative to brassicas. Oh dear. Talk about two ends of the spectrum!
How weird would it be to see the footage of a cucumber being sensually caressed (6:43) without context.
I thought it was weird that I thought coffee and cucumber went well together last week. Cool that they share some aromatic compounds
I never heard something so profound, but so accurate that I agree with.
You should look into making Curries from different cultures. For example Trinidadian style curry or Jamaican
Hey Adam! I'm a huge fan of your work, even though there's a few recipes of yours I'm not a big fan of. I seem to have chronic canker sores which makes eating very acidic meals a nightmare.
As for your love of acidity, why don't we look for meals that are basic, or high in pH? Are there just naturally not many high pH edible substances? Is it a taste that unlike acidity nobody really likes?
There's this thing the older people in my house used to do with cucumbers to reduce their bitterness. They would cut a small part off the top and rub the two sections together, releasing a white foam and then rinse and repeat. I couldn't find much info online but maybe a future video experiment?
Yes, this is a common practice in India too. Apparently the white foamy substance has all the bitterness concentrated in it.
How does that affect any of the cucumber thats not directly at the surface?
@@fossil98 no idea that's why I think it might be a great experiment video the one Adam usually does
The real trick is to pick the cucumber out of the plant very early in the morning and keep it cool, away from sunlight.
A friend showed me that trick years ago. You can get a pretty sizable blob of bitter stuff doing that. I figured some kind of capillary suction happening on the skin, but honestly I don't know why/where it comes from for sure. ";^)
We bought cucumber seeds for our garden one year and for a little while I thought we were going to harvest cucumbers, they looked the same-until they turned into very recognizable cantaloupe lol. Somebody messed up at the seed factory 😂
Every time Adam puts out a knowledge dumping video like this, I know I'm going to enjoy it. It's legitimately like a classroom experience, with new vocabulary words, lots of term papers, some really funny facts (explosions!), and a great deal of surprisingly fascinating information. He knows how to put on an entertaining lecture and it shows. Melons! Who knew? Oh wait...HE did.
I never knew the us had different cucumbers then we have here in europe
I've always had a bit of nausea when eating cucumber or watermelon after a large meal and no one I told believed me because of the apparent difference between cucumbers or watermelons. Knowing they're related makes me think there might've been something to it that wasn't just in my head (although perhaps it's something as simple as their water content).
I've always eaten cucumbers with the skin on, though most of the time they were cucumbers my dad grew. I've never thought that they were difficult to eat. Despite him growing them every year I've never seen thorns on them. Maybe a different variety? Maybe I'm just unobservant. I dunno.
Maybe he's growing a European/Asian variety
I've grown gherkins in my garden and while they definitely had noticeable spikes, they could be brushed off easily and probably just eaten if the texture didn't bother you. As with all things cultivated, we've minimised the aspects that inconvenience and maximise those which satisfy.
We pickle the yellow cucumbers too. First we core them to remove the bitterness and pickle them in various ways: Ginger pickles, Polish dills, Cajun hot, Kosher dills, garlic habanero (my favorites), and sweet Reapers. The various peppers are used for flavor, not for extreme heat, though if you eat 3 or 4 pickles in a row you'll definitely feel it. No matter the variety, we make and eat ~100 jars each year.
Yours are the only ads I don't mind watching
Cucumber taste exactly like watermelon to me. I guess it's that compound that I'm extremely sensitive to. I can taste residual cucumbers if I ask for a salad at a restaurant without cucumbers and they just plucked them out. Even over the dressing, I can still taste watermelon. I really don't like watermelon, but I can dill with pickles. 🤪
0:35 bro, natural grenade 💀
People calling cucumbers "crunchy water" always makes me feel crazy because to me, cucumber has a very prominent, bitter flavor that makes them unpalatable unless they're in a strong sauce like tzatziki. It's also the reason that I can't stand cucumber pickles and prefer things like pickled radishes. The flavors and textures are a lot more pleasant.
East european cucumbers are bitterless
@@SviatoslavDamaschin I live in Europe and I feel the exact same way as OP. Absolutely hate the "sharp," bitter taste of cucumbers. Also hate melons for the same reason.
@@d4n4nable Yeah, that sharp bitter taste is truly awful, I wonder why they don't sell the persian variety
You might be sensitive to the cucumbitins in it
To me they only have a slight taste - it taste like crunchy wafer with a slight bitter flavor. The Persian cucumber / pickle has no bitter taste to me
Not sure if they are native, but in Texas/Mexico we have wild cucumbers that you can forage (Mexican Gherkins/Creeping Cucumber). They look just like tiny watermelons and taste great! Just don't eat one after they turn black! (becomes a potent laxative)
I have to say this is my favourite non-recipe video so far
Am i crazy or that slice of cucumber in 12:03 looks like amongus
Yes
2:10 American cucumbers look dry AF
3:10 i dont like the way adam said "bottle" especially when talking about cucumbers
"melon is not a scientific term it means whatever we say it means" I love you!
this guy's ad transitions are the best