Cooking with Jerusalem Artichokes

The trouble with some crops is that they are too abundant and you face the issue of what to do with a gigantic harvest. The problem is compounded when you admit to yourself that you not quite sure where they fit it into your everyday meals (read: I don't really like the taste or smell etc). I have always felt this way about Jerusalem Artichokes. They are easy to grow, have attractive small sunflowers in autumn and produce unbelievable quantities of gnarly cream-coloured edible rhizomes. No matter how thorough your harvest of these rhizomes even the tiniest fragment left in the soil will re-sprout next spring making Jerusalem Artichokes an indestructible perennial vegetable and weedy to boot.

A gnarly pot-grown Jerusalem Artichoke

This year I grew Jerusalem Artichokes in two large pots. I pretty much neglected them and on hot days they wilted and looked awful. In fact by the end of summer the plants were not especially robust looking and I didn't expect much of a harvest. Yesterday I tipped them out of their pots and what emerged was a decent crop after all - around 30 medium sized rhizomes. Now although I don't mind baked artichoke roots and I have used them sliced raw in salads they generally don't inspire me. (And this lack of inspiration isn't because of the "gas" they cause, you know "Fartichokes"...).

Only once have I really enjoyed JAs and this was when a friend cooked up a French soup recipe using blended JAs with lots of cream. It was delicious and there was a distinctive artichoke flavour that made them seem like a worthwhile crop to have on hand. So yesterday I searched for JA recipe on the internet and found a recipe at http://chocolateandzucchini.com/archives/2009/10/jerusalem_artichoke_soup_with_bacon.php...this is apparently a well-know cooking blog and had a great discussion on the use of JAs in French cooking, especially for survival cooking during the First World War.  I used Canna tubers and one potato along with the artichokes but otherwise I followed the recipe quite closely. The resulting soup was nourishing and tasty. For this recipe alone I will grow Jerusalem Artichokes with a little more effort next year.

Taste-testing 'obscure' vegies - Canna Lily

We often hear about the great reduction in the diversity of foodstuffs available to modern consumers. There are hundreds of varieties of apples (for example), but only four or five apple types that make it into supermarkets. Equally, there are hundreds of edible plant species in the world, many of which are both ancient and popular staples in other countries that we never get to taste, let alone grow.

Well, in fact sometimes we grow these plants as horticultural specimens, having no idea that elsewhere people have been harvesting and eating our garden variety standbys for millennia. One of these is Canna Lily! The Canna Lilies of suburbia, in gardens and parks, are gaudy clumps of bronze-purple, lush looking leaves with huge spikes of over the top orange flowers that glow on a hot Summer's day. They look spectacular, if not a little overwhelming. These types have been bred for their flowers but in South America people have been eating the roots as a starch staple, along with potatoes for thousands of years.

The thought of eating Canna roots so intrigued me I bought 20 rhizomes of Canna edulis/indica from Green Harvest last year and placed them in several food gardens. This Canna species, called Achira in the Andes, has been bred for its edible roots rather than flowers although it still produces lush foliage and small red flowers. My Cannas grew prolifically and looked fantastic growing in amongst traditional vegies but I still couldn't bring myself to enthusiastically munch on Canna roots, especially as they don't look too appetising (see photo).

Last week, however, I got over conservatism and dug up some big roots. I peeled them, cut them into bite-sized chunks for baking and shoved them in the oven. The verdict - they were great! They were road tested on friends who also found them quite more-ish for their strangely sweet, almost cake like qualities (crossed with a potato, perhaps). I'm going to dwell on this description and provide more details on Canna Root Cooking and Canna Lilies in my next post.