posted 2 years ago
In particular, did anyone here grow up eating poke?
It loves to grow in my yard and I'd like to learn to use it, but the interwebs is so full of an endless echo chamber of how dangerous it is that it's hard to get real information.
The JLHudson seed catalog has a quote saying that anyone who tells you to boil poke should be forced to boil their asparagus, so it made me think some of the warnings may be overblown.
At present I boil it once for a few minutes and then use it. I don't boil any other vegetable, so that seems extreme to me. I'm sure if I boiled it three times I'd have mush that I wouldn't be able to remove from the water.
I have another point of confusion. Most sources talk about using it when it first emerges in spring, but it doesn't get cold enough here to die back, so I just use it before it makes flower stalks or turns red-purple on the stalks. So advice from a similarly warm place would be especially useful.
I don't eat a lot at once, and stop when I get a hunch I might have had enough, and only do it a few times a year, if that. But further guidance from folks with experience would make me more secure in my experiments.
It seems kinda like chard to me, lotsa oxalates.
