Valencian researchers recover the ancient purple carrot, juicier, crunchier and sweeter than oranges

The safanòria morálike all carrots, is an edible root, but purple and almost disappeared in Alicante lands. Its cultivation and production was being lost because the farmers did not see it as interesting.

For recover this ancestral vegetablel, they have first planted different varieties in test fields together with current commercial varieties to compare them.

Of all of them, they have selected the one with the best organoleptic quality and flavor. Later, after analyzing them in a laboratory, a more profitable variety for cultivation and more nutritious has been obtained, which is pending registration to protect it.

Juicier, sweeter and crunchier: this is the variety

“They have more flavor, more juiciness, they don’t ball up like oranges which are more fibrous and dry, and have a higher content of simple sugars”, explains Adrián Rodríguez, Professor of Genetics at the Polytechnic University of Valencia.

More cylindrical and smaller in size, the new carrot presents more changes. “It’s purple on the outside and white on the inside, much sweeter and crunchier than the others,” says José Navarro, a farmer from this

José has already produced more than 8,000 kilos this season and he hopes that more farmers will encourage the cultivation of this seed that has been kept for years, generation after generation, so as not to lose it.

The challenge of the Villena agricultural cooperative, which already produces more than 40,000 kilos a year is to expand its marketing. For this reason they have made a small investment to see the feasibility of marketing it first in the province and then throughout Spain.

The original carrot was purple

Originally from Afghanistan 3,000 years ago, what many do not know is that the color of the carrot was always purple and then changed. It was the Dutch who a few centuries ago promoted the selection and improvement of orange-type carrots in honor of the Orange house. But now, in Villena they want to recover the original, the dwelling.