Thanks for letting me know about org-entities. That is awesome. I now know how to escape various characters in general, but unfortunately this does not work within verbatim formatting (which makes sense).
* Escaping =equal= sign in verbatim formatting.
=a\equal{}b+c=
** Here's the same but using zero width spaces instead of /org entities/.
=a=b+c=
* Here I am trying to have double quotes in verbatim formatting.
=\quot{}This is inbetween double quotes\quot{}=.
** Here's the same but using zero width spaces instead of /org entities/.
="This is inbetween double quotes"=.
* And here's to escapes asterisks
This is *bold*. But this is \ast{}not bold\ast{}.
This works!