The great big thread of sunchoke info - growing, storing, eating/recipes, science facts

I read somewhere that digging sunchokes just as they are preparing to sprout - so, February in my climate & hemisphere - means the storage inulin is starting to be converted back to more readily available carbohydrates for the plant.

Has anyone got a source where this has been tested by measuring the insulin content through the winter & spring of sunchoke storage tubers?

Gordon Blair wrote:That's quite a story, Cécile! Lends anecdotal credence to the idea that sunchokes can provide serious human-available calories without breaking up the inulin into sugar first.
I have tried to acclimate to them, but perhaps it would need to be done more consistently and built up gradually.

Everyone's body is a bit different and that's a good thing as we can adapt to very different climes and diets.
The magic word is "adapt". The diet of the Eskimos has to be very different than the diet of someone who live under the tropics or in the Sahara. The joke is that if we go to Mexico, we are likely to develop a serious case of diarrhea because 'their water is different'. The Vietnamese who came here had a lot of difficulty with our cows' milk.
A friend of mine had serious allergies and she went to Madison to see an allergist. The allergist found out that she was allergic to a host of things. The course of action was interesting: Stop all allergens except one. Take a minute amount of it; so small that it won't cause problems, and daily increase the dose until your body tolerates it. Then introduce another allergen and repeat. She is now allergy-free. (It did take 3 years, though.)
Long story short, most of us will *adapt* to every allergen if it is introduced slowly. The dinosaurs disappeared quickly because the conditions changed much too rapidly for them to adapt.
Some species disappear, others appear, but we keeps living, procreating...changing imperceptibly from one generation to the next, but still going strong.
(Humans, with their superior intelligence are probably the only one that can mess that up).
I have a book by Ed Yong called "I contain multitudes" . The man looks too young to have found this much wisdom, but he's impressive!
https://youtu.be/aye91D0oTTw?si=HpNwBfUeI8WO6_aE
The author states that we actually are not individuals completely distinct from our surroundings:
In the air we breathe, the water we drink, the foods we eat, we invite a myriad of tiny critters within us. (Take that, Howard Hughes!)
Some pass through, others make themselves at home and live, procreate and die in our bodies. We are a giant incubator for them. Our colon is their cemetery.
We are a colony of parasites, a biomass of tiny critters living more or less harmoniously with each other in our entire bodies. This system, which we call our "digestive system" is in fact a great composting machine, and the process of digestion should be better called "the putrefaction system". (But we are too dainty/ civilized to admit it!)
This book made more sense to me than anything else I have read about how our body functions...

stuff from samantha's video that i like:

- sunchokes are native to my area!

      (sacajawea dug them up and fed them to lewis and clark)

- 64,000 pounds per acre without irrigation

      (330 calories per pound -> 21.1 million calories per acre)

- grocery stores prefer potatoes because potatoes have a long shelf life

- a crop to say "fuck you" to "the system"

- more potassium than bananas

- b vitamins

- boosts immune function

- fights cancer

- mitigates diabetes

- builds soil while most other crops deplete soil

- "invasive" is the word we use for things that succeed without permission

- sunchokes do not need corporate approval

Ac Baker wrote:Has anyone got a source where this has been tested by measuring the insulin content through the winter & spring of sunchoke storage tubers?

https://cropj.com/sennoi_15_12_2021_1395_1398.pdf suggests rather small decrease when stored at 5 deg C.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12466436/#sec4-antioxidants-14-01109 suggests that different cultivars have different storage characterstics (at 0 degC) and that the form of inulin (eg. degree of polymerisation) also changes during storage.

Interesting.

So, in my climate, sunchokes overwinter well in the ground.

Then we get to decide the harvest date based upon the properties we want in our crop.

I've not been able to find inulin measurements based upon harvesting at the start of the new season of budding/sprouting growth.

But the consensus seems to be that, for a given variety and year, the inulin content will rise once the leaves are established, peaking around the first hard frost when the leaves are killed off.  This is likely to be up to 85% of dry weight.

Then the inulin content will start to fall significantly when the budding process begins in late winter or early spring, as enzymes convert the inulin to simple sugars e.g. fructose, for new plant growth, reaching a minimum just as the new leaves start to usefully photosynthesize. This could be as low as 60% of dry weight.

But I can't find a temperate climate study that tests these two figures, as yet.

Om, so… my family has had sunchokes ever since I can remember. We eat them raw in salads, and I like the flavor.
However, any time we cook them, (baked, mashed, or in soup), they taste watery to me, with a “sharp” flavor that I don’t like at all.
What I am wondering is, is this a varietal thing? I have only ever eaten from the family patch. We nearly always dig them after frost, though we did try early to see if that improved cooking texture.
Had anyone had experience with different strains? Some being good cooked and some less so?

Lina Joana wrote:Om, so… my family has had sunchokes ever since I can remember. We eat them raw in salads, and I like the flavor.
However, any time we cook them, (baked, mashed, or in soup), they taste watery to me, with a “sharp” flavor that I don’t like at all.
What I am wondering is, is this a varietal thing? I have only ever eaten from the family patch. We nearly always dig them after frost, though we did try early to see if that improved cooking texture.
Had anyone had experience with different strains? Some being good cooked and some less so?

So, when raw, they are nice and crispy, good flavor, but when cooked, "sharp" and watery?
The watery part could be that they are cooked a bit too long, because indeed, if you cook them too long, they will eventually fall apart completely.
"sharp", I do not quite understand. Sharp like apple juice left a bit too long in the sun (your tongue tingles a bit), or too salty? It does sound like the cooking method. Does anything else you cook in that water have an off taste or do you soak them too long? or add too much salt?
I love them raw as well, like radishes, but the pink one give me serious gas. Not the white ones, so it could also be the cultivar, although tasting them raw side by side, I don't think I'd be able to taste much of a difference between the varietals.  I wish I could be more useful.

To me, describing a cooked sunroot as "sharp" implies that cooking really brings out the flavor/aroma of sunflower resin. I don't much care for that flavor, so I prefer to eat them raw, lacto-fermented, or added in small amounts to roasts, stews, or stir-fries.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:
To me, describing a cooked sunroot as "sharp" implies that cooking really brings out the flavor/aroma of sunflower resin. I don't much care for that flavor, so I prefer to eat them raw, lacto-fermented, or added in small amounts to roasts, stews, or stir-fries.

I never thought of sunchokes as tasting like resin (? you mean like pine pitch?)... My favorite way is boiled with a little mayo added. The inulin really comes out. Come to think of it, that's also the way I love my asparagus, which has a fair amount of inulin.
I think raw works for me too, but not too much the first couple of times I eat them raw in the spring. Do you peel them? I don't bother when I eat them raw or when I cook them,
When they are cooked, I grab them by the part that was closer to the mother, pinch a little with my teeth and pull all the good stuff through the growth bud: No peeling!
I'll have to try lacto-fermented. do you have a recipe?

Some varieties are more resinous (yes, like pine pitch(ish)) than others. I kind of like the medicinal quality that gives them but it might be a lot if you were eating a whole bowl of them instead of a few as a snack or mixed into an autumn stew.

When I dig sunroots, I immediately wash them and store in plastic. Due to that, the skin stays soft and tender when I eat them, so I don't  peel.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:When I dig sunroots, I immediately wash them and store in plastic. Due to that, the skin stays soft and tender when I eat them, so I don't  peel.

Neat trick for not having to peel them, but the skins don't really bother me.
I store them dirty and in the crisper of a fridge I have in the garage or in a plastic bucket. (I tried once washing them and sticking them in a plastic bag and they rotted. I must have had a compromised tuber. It was a liquefied mess. Yuck!).
Central WI is a big area for potatoes, which are stored fridge cold with 90% humidity in great big dark sheds. Sunroots store quite well that way.. They do carrots that way too. When you think of it, that's pretty much the ideal conditions of a good root cellar..

Here are my lacto fermented daikon and sunchoke. The yellow color is from boiled turmeric water.

..'Baby Steps', right?

Ac Baker wrote:Interesting.

So, in my climate, sunchokes overwinter well in the ground.

Then we get to decide the harvest date based upon the properties we want in our crop.

I've not been able to find inulin measurements based upon harvesting at the start of the new season of budding/sprouting growth.

But the consensus seems to be that, for a given variety and year, the inulin content will rise once the leaves are established, peaking around the first hard frost when the leaves are killed off.  This is likely to be up to 85% of dry weight.

Then the inulin content will start to fall significantly when the budding process begins in late winter or early spring, as enzymes convert the inulin to simple sugars e.g. fructose, for new plant growth, reaching a minimum just as the new leaves start to usefully photosynthesize. This could be as low as 60% of dry weight.

But I can't find a temperate climate study that tests these two figures, as yet.

I don't have the means to measure inulin, however this year I harvested my first sunchokes last week, just after the ground thawed. At that point they were large, crisp, and sweet and best of all, no gas!

I had planted some rather scrawny fall tubers I got from friends two years back, but was loathe to eat much of them because the few times I had eaten sunchokes previously I had horrible bloating. Reading this thread got me thinking that the roots I bought at market might have been harvested at wrong point or stored at wrong temperature.

Spring thaw harvest really seems like the better way to go! Plus, a crop to fill the late winter/early spring famine season.

Something I noticed today… I was making stewed sunchokes and noticed as the liquid coalesced into a sort of syrup! It was rich in flavor and rather sweet.

After all this maple sap in various stages of evaporation, do I need even more sugar??

I do think the stewing was what released it.

I make wine by boiling the tubers and using the broth. I have to pour the broth and mix in sugar while it's still warm, otherwise the broth stiffens up nearly as stiff and thick as pork souse jell. I use only a small palm-full of raisins for fruit yeast and they too go in while the broth is warm so they'll mix in. After a few days of fermenting the jell returns to liquid. It's the Inulin and other starches that thicken it. Inulin is a sweetener and a texture 'silkifier', a fat substitute, that's added to many foods such as ice creme. Inulin is also added to many brands of makeup because of this silkience.