Bitter gourd or karela is an important vegetable in summer. However, people generally struggle to cook this veggie because everyone does not love its bitterness. Here are six ways in which you can get rid of the bitterness in karela.
Rub salt on the pieces of karela and leave them for 15-20 minutes. This helps in extracting the bitter juices from karela. Then, soak the vegetable in cold water and rinse to remove bitterness and salt.
Scraping the skin of the bitter gourd using a knife or a peeler also helps in removing the bitterness of the vegetable. After the skin is peeled, sprinkling salt over it and leaving it for 15-20 minutes helps in removing its bitterness.
In this process, pieces of karela are first placed in boiling water for two to three minutes and then immediately transferred to ice water. This is the easiest and quickest way to remove bitterness.
The pieces of karela are squeezed firmly so as to release some bitter juices and then rinsed in cold running water to remove all the bitterness.
If karela is marinated with some sour ingredients like tamarind paste, lemon juice and vinegar, that helps balance out the bitterness of the vegetable.
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