How to Make Bitter Melon Taste Amazing

Bitter melon is, as one might tell from the name, a bitter vegetable in the gourd family. You see this vegetable a lot in Asian and Southeast Asian cooking, but if you’ve never delved deep into it it can definitely seem intimidating. But, it is always great to play with new ingredients so next time you see one of these strange looking cucumber-like vegetables, buy one and try using it with one of these applications!

Fat

What a lot of people don’t know is that you don’t necessarily need to put sweet with bitter to balance each other out. In reality, fat actually does a lot of good when combined with bitter to mellow out the unpleasant taste. And especially for bitter melon, it could definitely use some fat. Even if that just means sauteing it in a lot of butter, it’ll really lighten up on the bitterness.

Stews

A very traditional way to use bitter melon is to put it in a Bengali stew such as tetor dal with sometimes meat and usually lentils. As the bitter melon simmers away with the ghee and all the other spices, the bitter melon will really come alive and actually taste amazing.