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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 64.105.34.8 (talk) at 18:56, 18 January 2011 (→‎Chinese characters). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Chinese characters

What are the Chinese characters for Bitter Melon (Foo Gwa)?

In addition to this, staying on the language subject, about halfway down the page is a comment that says "There is a saying...." and goes on to say something in what I think is Malaysian... that's fine, but what's it mean? It just seems like a completely dissociated comment.

Quinine question

Does this plant contain quinine? Various websites claim it does, but I've been unable to locate a primary source for this info 4hodmt 15:20, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Recent reorganization

I have tried to organize a little without taking away any information. If I did it was a mistake.

I tried to separate the long list of names in many languages into those that are actually used in English text and those that are only used in their original languages. Basically, I googled for "the karela" and "the ampalaya" and got convincing results, but couldn't find a lot of relevant uses of "the pavakka" or "the karawila".

— Pekinensis 18:51, 20 June 2006 (UTC) Yes have you tasted it lately its Very bitter thr younger the plant the more intence the bitter....So with that said my blood sugerlevels have gone down since eating the plant....my Doctor thinks i am doing all he tells me what he wants me to do but in truth is the bitter melon..... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.77.205.144 (talk) 23:52, 12 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Recipes

My wife likes to stuff bitter melon with a pork mixture and boil it. We eat it with rice. The Pilipino version I had was baked and stuffed with ground beef and cheese. That one was mighty tasty! The bitterness can be somewhat alleviated by baptising it in soy sauce. Do Americanos really know about this fruit?Jlujan69 22:13, 10 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My mother was looking into it because of the connected diabetes information with it. I started eating it because its another good vegetable. There's a Chinese place in NJ (US) that always has it with the other hot food they make and I always get it. They even sell it not cooked. I've also found it in Korean markets and Indian markets in jersey. I've yet to buy it and cook it, but I found various recipes online. Psilocybin 06:25, 31 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In Chinese restruants in China, its often served as a cold dish of just bitter melon. cold dishes are like bread in american restruants, they are served first while your food is being cooked.

Sweet bitter melon

I have been trying to correct this statement but was edited out: "The fully ripe fruit turns orange and mushy, is too bitter to eat". Amazingly, bitten melow turns to very sweet like a fruit once it is ripe. Grown up in the countryside of China, one of my childhood joys was that my Dad would let some of the bitter melows ripe so my brother and I could eat them like fruits. Bitter melow is bitter before mature so it can fend of the animals, but turns to sweet when mature so the seeds can be spread by the animals - A common evolution strategy for many plants.

Bitter melon as it ripens become yellowish / orange at the "undulations." The pith remains mostly white but becomes more stringy. The individually seed are coated with a red flesh that is quite mild and sweet. The flesh itself become softer and less crunchy. I know this because my grandma grows several varieties of it annually.

ABC Dude Abides

Other on-line articles say that ripe bitter melon isn't quite so bitter. Over 50 years of experience with preparation, cooking and eating bitter melon has taught me that ripe bitter melon is sweeter than green. When the flesh becomes reddish-orange, the seeds turn red and the pulp yellow. I actually look for ripe bitter melon in the market; it tastes better!

Most Cantonese recipes for bitter melon include fermented black beans. Restaurants serve it stir-fried with strips of flank steak in a black bean sauce. Home-style recipes call for 1-inch rings of bitter melon stuffed with a mixture of ground pork, diced waterchestnuts, diced black mushrooms, ham and black bean sauce. The stuffed rings are steamed for about 15 to 20 minutes.

Merge

Please merge Foo qua into Bitter melon. Badagnani 20:33, 22 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Done.--Curtis Clark 04:34, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Clutter of Recipes

The recipes section sounds too much like a cookbook. Can we all take a look at paring this down to the essential categories of culinary uses? Even the Tomato article has a shorter section on culinary applications! I'm adding the laundry list tag, which is the best tag I can find to represent this problem. Smartperson (talk) 16:21, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. I removed a bunch - but it still needs cleanup.. I'll take another look later if no one else does. I was thinking of making a list of simple references to different countries (reducing all the text). If anyone wants to create a 'ways to prepare bitter melon' wiki entry, see this diff report [1]. Luminifer (talk) 17:59, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, I have restored, with minor editing of grammar and some re-arrangement for clarity, the "culinary uses" section as it stood prior to Lumifers removal of most of the interesting materials there. In my opinion that page was a model for the sort of information that OUGHT to be included in any page referring to a food item. The biological information is important, but if I look up bitter melon on wikipedia, the main thing I want to know is "how do I cook the thing?" As for "sounding too much like a cookbook", all of that is down to the one recipe in the Pakistani section which contains the following sentence: "Now the pan is covered with a lid, heat reduced to minimum, the tomatoes reduce, and all the spices work their magic." But so what? If somebody from North American wants to know about bitter melon, it is extremely helpful to get an idea of what people around the world do with the thing. Was that hurting anyone? The new page, by contrast, was unreadably dry.

If for some reason someone feels that this information belongs on a seperate "ways to prepare bitter melon" page, then by all means create such a page, but please do not simply wantonly delete information that is useful and interesting to many people. That Pakistani recipe, for example, and the Nepalese information, is unlike--and better than--anything I've found elsewhere on the web. Finally, even if the "original" section was in want of pruning, the new one--as it stood before I restored the September version--was even worse. It seemed like little more than a catalog of names in foreign languages, with highly limited and vague references to preparation methods. Who cares about the names for dishes if we aren't even going to be told what the dishes are? Thank you.

Yesterday I restored the "culinary uses" section to what it was before a recent hatchet job was done to it; today I found the hatchet job restored. Now in case anyone thinks the hatchet job was a good idea, here is a bit of criticism:

The first line reads in its entirety: "in Chinese cooking , often with pork and douchi), in soups, and also as tea." This isn't even a sentence.

The fourth sentence is: 

"in Tamil Nadu it is referred as பாகற்காய் (Pagarkai) slangily called as Pavakkai பாவக்காய் and there is a regimen of popular recipes like "Pavakkai Poriyal", "Pavakkai Varuval", " Pavakkai Vathal", "Pavakkai Puli Kulambu", "Pavakkai Puli Thokku", "Pavakkai Satham", "Pavakai Thair Kulambu", "Pavakkai Peratal", "Pavakkai Chips", "Pavakkai Pitlai", "Pavakkai Oorukai"

This is ridiculous. Who cares about all these names? If someone wanted to tell us what one or two of these dishes was(was?? or were?), that would be a different story. The fact that the last editor got rid of all the interesting information (what do people actually do with the vegetable?) and left this catalogue does not speak much for his discernment.

Again, the sixth sentence, in full, was "In Marathi, the term used for bitter gourd is Kaarla "

Who cares? And why is this in the "culinary uses"?

The seventh sentence is "in Karnataka, the term used for bitter gourd is haagalakai (ಹಾಗಲಕಾಯಿ) and used in preparation of a delicacy called gojju (ಗೊಜ್ಜು"

This would be nice is someone gave us a hint as to what the delicacy called gojju was. Lacking such information it is yet another in a long and dreary catalogue of names which do not give us a clue about the thing.

Meanwhile, lots of interesting information has been cut out. Basically, am I justified in calling the September editing a hatchet job? Anything that contained information he got rid of. In Pakistan they sautee onions in one pot and bitter melon in another, then mix the two together with turmeric, cumin, hot pepper etc, then simmer in tomato sauce for an hour. that's information. He got rid of all of it. He got rid of the fact that in Vietnam it's eaten during the Tet celebrations. He got rid of all the information about the treatment of bitter melon in Nepal and replaced it with the meaningless line "In Nepal it is prepared in various ways." Why is something so vapid even there? He basically created a catalogue of names and vapid statements.


So, what I have done is the opposite of what the last editor did. I restored all the information that could be of some interest or use to someone trying to learn about the HOW THE VEGETABLE IS COOKED, which is supposed to be the matter found in a 'culinary use' section. And I have gotten rid of most but not all of the "dictionary". If anyone thinks all those names help, please put them somewhere else.

And please, do not just restore the hatchet job. If you have a meaningful problem with the section, how about discussing my contribution here instead of just undoing it? 66.234.47.194 (talk) 18:01, 7 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I removed the section once more as it is not encyclopedic. One doesn't look in an encyclopedia for information on how you cook a food, one looks in a cookbook. Wikipedia is not a cookbook. Falcon8765 (talk) 04:59, 9 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This is ridiculous. You're so offended by real cooking information, but you have no problem with totally ungrammatical sentences. You have no problem with pure nonsense (a string of eleven names of dishes about which we are given absolutely no information? So what are the names doing there?) and you have no problem with sentence like "Marathi, the term used for bitter gourd is Kaarla." which have nothing to do with "Culinary Use." Apparently you would have to do some thinking or actual work to fix those problems; undoing my work is all you're capable of. The only thing in the section that is really a recipe was on Wikipedia from August 2007 until about a month ago. It presumably did not harm anyone in all that time. Much of the other deleted information is far older than that. The fact remains that the new section, as you have left it, is idiotic for all the reasons I detailed above. Your problem with the section that I have restored would be more credible if a) that section hadn't been peacefully residing on Wikipedia for more than two years and b) you had found some other way of improving the hash as it now stands, rather than simply restoring it.

Finally, the statement "One doesn't look in an encyclopedia for information on how you cook a food, one looks in a cookbook." is silly. How one cooks bitter melon is part of the meaningful information about bitter melon which one would like to have. And since the information which you are trying to delete is not to be found elsewhere on the internet you are impoverishing the internet while you impoverish wikipedia.

Anytime someone who is capable of thought and dialogue wants to work with me to improve this section I would be more than happy to cooperate. In the meantime, people whose intellectual ability extends to hitting an "undo" button and mouthing platitudes are not doing wikipedia any favors.

This section contains far too much recipe detail for an encyclopedic entry on a plant. The Pakistan bit, in particular, seems to be more about making South Asian-style curry than about the bitter melon's culinary uses in Pakistan. Lack of availability elsewhere on the internet does not justify inclusion in Wikipedia. It's not that the recipe information isn't useful; it could be, but it's not encyclopedic. I agree that information on how people cook bitter melon is meaningful, but perhaps a general description of regional variation in preparing bitter melon would be more appropriate than a step-by-step recipe. (If it worries you that removing the recipe will "impoverish the internet", you might consider adding it to Wikibooks Cookbook.)
Having said that, I think that reverting to the previous version is simply exchanging one set of problems for another. The previous version does have major grammatical and formatting issues, amongst others. I'd suggest working from this version (the one with the recipes), shrinking the "Culinary uses" section down, rewriting/removing extraneous information and incorporating information and internal links from the previous edit, to make it work as an encyclopedia entry. I might do this later, unless someone else wants to do it first. NotAnonymous (talk) 16:21, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Karela/Karella

Bitter Melons or Bitter Gourds are also known as Karelas, or the alternative spelling Karella. Please stop removing this. Vexorg (talk) 03:21, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Source copied almost verbatim

Many paragraphs of this article were taken verbatim from
A MEDICINAL POTENCY OF MOMORDICA CHARANTIA[sic]
D. Sathish Kumar, K. Vamshi Sharathnath, P. Yogeswaran, A. Harani, K. Sudhakar, P. Sudha, David Banji;
International Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences Review and Research Volume 1, Issue 2, March – April 2010; Article 018.
including some errors, bad wordings, and repetitions. Or the other way around. Either way the article does not seem to be authoritative (not a peer-reviewed journal?) I have edited some of the wording but the information needs checking. --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 02:16, 21 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The sentence "Bitter Melon contains four very promising bioactive compounds.", which is identical in our article and theirs, was also present in this version of our article on 27 Feb 2010; their article was is dated Mar-Apr 2010. The same goes for "Laboratory tests suggest that compounds in bitter melon might be effective for treating HIV infection" and "The study revealed that a 100 milligram per kilo dose per day is comparable to 2.5 milligrams of the anti-diabetes drug Glibenclamide taken twice per day", both of which are referenced in our article but not in theirs. So they copied us, and they've failed to acknowledge the fact as legally required by our Terms of Use.
For future reference, if you ever find a genuine copyright violation, the normal procedure is to remove it outright, rather than editing it. I'm no lawyer, but I think the idea is that simply editing a copyvio risks creating an unauthorised derivative of a copyright work, which is itself a copyright violation. If you're not sure you can always report at Wikipedia:Copyright problems.
Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 07:58, 21 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I noticed the copyvio only after editing the article. (While googling for references on momordicin, I found their article and recognized the broken sentences that I had just been trying to clean up.) As for editing vs deleting, the copyright applies to the text but not to the information; so one can remove a copyvio also by thoroughly rephrasing and reorganizing the material. All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 21:55, 27 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Confusion with Momordica balsamina?

There may be some confusion between this and similar species Momordica balsamina, also scattered worldwide:

Would someone please check this issue? Thanks... --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 21:48, 27 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have removed those items pending verification:
[also called ...] balsamino (in Panama),
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