the best way to eat them is sliced thin and air fried or roasted. Theyre so tasty when you brown then up and they get a little crispy on the edges. yum. it makes them not only palatable but delicious.
i had ‘stampede’ ‘red fuseau’ and ‘white fuseau’ here plus some wildlings. If you want to get rid of them, dont harvest them. Seriously, they thrive on disturbance. If you try to dig them all up, they come back in force. You can also pull then when the shoots are fully pushed and the tubers have used their reserves up. Dont ever put them in your garden. People of a certain age here all have horror stories of doing that, and most wont grow them for that reason. The way I see it, you dont keep pigs in your livingroom, but theyre still worth raising. Speaking of pigs, sunchokes are primo animal forage. You can (from what Ive read) grow a big patch of them and then turn the pigs on them. theyll root out every tuber and it will finish them nicely. the whole plant is good animal feed, not just the tubers.
does anyone know a good source/store that sells named varieties and ships tubers in the US? found these sites from a google search but not sure if reputable. cultivariable, etsy
I got all of mine from @JohannsGarden . Not only is he a forum member but he has a beautiful nursery and a ton of knowledge and time spent with his products.
I grow them exactly as @Itmaybejj does. FWIW, I stored the seed tubers in a plastic bag in a fridge for many months this winter with no apparent ill effects.
This is my first year growing Jerusalem artichokes. I planted the gifted tubers in pots buried in the ground as well. The stems have nearly dried down entirely and I am looking forward to digging the first of 8 pots to see how bountiful the harvest is.
What varieties is everyone growing? I have stampede and Fuseau here, though I haven’t harvested them in several years. I do like them, but theyve gone by the wayside for me of late. Im much more excited about yacon these days. Its much more of a fruit than a starchy tuber. It has as much or more inulin as sunchokes from what I gather, and is not only palatable but very tasty. Sunchokes are great fried, but prepared nearly any other way they can be a bit much even for me, and I like oddball stuff. If I had livestock though, especially pigs, Id grow a huge patch of them. They make great fodder from what Ive read.
So was digging the garden for spring amd found that the voles hadn’t eaten all the tubers. But interestingly some of the tubers turned red in response to damage while others stayed white
they do that. I think the white ones will eventually turn red. its an oxidizing response perhaps. Voles actually help the sunchokes quite a bit IME. The more they eat (counterintuitively) the better the patch seems to grow the next year. I have patches that were barely disturbed (harvested, munched by voles, or otherwise) and theyve almost disappeared
I planted a small (I thought) bunch of Jerusalem artichokes and now I’ve completed the harvest – roughly 30 gallons (i.e., I filled a 5 gallon bucket at least 6 times). I’ve given two buckets to the local food bank; they seem very happen to have received them. But even after planting some for next year’s crop and making more donations, I’ll still have more that I can use.
So now the question: Can JA’s be fermented? Note that I do not want to buy any enzymes to turn inulin into fructose. So the question is really whether any commercial yeasts come with enzymes built in. Can any commercial yeasts turn inulin to alcohol?
You can ferment them and they will be very digestible. Like fermented cucumber pickles, you will need to add a source of tannins or else they will get mushy.
It’s also easy enough to just cook them in lemon water since heat + acid breaks inulin down into fructose. The end result won’t be sour (unless you really overdo the ration of lemon to water).
Thanks. I like them roasted so I don’t really need to acid soak. But I’ll try it. My wife tried a vinegar solution but without the heat, to no effect.
Re the fermentation, let me make sure I understand the process. For starters, it’s not yeast fermenting the inulin to fructose to ethanol. Rather, it’s lactic acid bacteria fermenting the inulin to fructose to lactic acid. Is that right?
Assuming so, that’s a great suggestion. I’ve done other fermentations using yeast (mead, cider) and bacteria, both LAB (yogurt, koumiss, cheese) and Acetobacter (apple cider vinegar). I’ve been itching to make sauerkraut. This would be a good entry into lactic fermentation of vegetables.
Of course, that would still use only ~10-20% of my supply.
The reaction is from heat + acid. It only takes about a half hour of cooking to convert a high percentage of the inulin to fructose. Much more energy efficient than slow roasting and also the end result is still relatively firm (which I like).
Regarding the fermentation, it’s not gonna be a single organism fermenting them since it’s not sterilized and then inoculated with isolated cultures. Rather, the naturally occurring organisms on the rhizomes will get the ferment going. It will be bacteria dominant though and the resulting flavor will be tangy.
