Cooking with Skirret root

Now you've grown it - what do you do with it? This thread is for sharing recipes and eating experiences of skirret roots.

a little piece of skirret

First recipe - cake!

juice and pulp from skirret root

I had pulp extracted from skirret root as part of my experiment in trying to make sugar from it See this thread) So it seemed to me that as it was still fairly sweet, the pulp might make a good starting point for a cake.

My recipe:
8 ounces de-juiced skirret pulp
2 ounces plain wheat flour
1 tea spoon baking powder
2 ounces melted butter
4 ounces mixed vine fruit
2 eggs
method: mix all ingredients together and put into a cake tin, bake in a moderate oven for about an hour and a half till it felt elastic to the touch.

Sorry I can't be more accurate than that for temperature, since my oven doesn't have a truthful thermometer at the moment - I guess it was probably 160 degrees Celsius.

The result:

skirret pulp cake - first attempt

The cake did not rise very much - you can see it is still pretty craggy. The texture is a little dense. I suspect that more flour would help with this, or possibly a looser mixture, so adding a bit of milk to make the batter more runny. It tastes good! I was worried that it wouldn't be sweet enough, which is why I added the vine fruit, but you could probably get away without those and it would still be pleasantly sweet. The one bit I have tried so far did have a small twiggy bit in, so I think if your skirret tends to fibrous cores then removing these first might be wise.

Possible other variations: using whole lightly cooked skirret root (removing cores), increasing flour content, missing out dried fruit.

Now I want to try making a yeast-raised bread with skirrit pulp, like porridge bread!!

Ac Baker wrote:Now I want to try making a yeast-raised bread with skirrit pulp, like porridge bread!!

Do you want me to send some pulp down to you? I have quite a bit left still

Nancy, I don't want to assume you have had carrot cake before but if you did do you think Skirret might be able to be subbed in?

I hear Skirret tastes a little bit like carrot, I just am trying to wrap my head around how to approach it as a novice baker.

Timothy - that would certainly be another way of approaching it - as Pearl would say there is a whole cake spectrum out there of flour/eggs/fat/sugar/raising agent in different proportions. I suspect the difference to carrots will be that I don't think you can grate skirret root. From my experiences trying to juice it, I suspect it will form a pulp rather than slivers. Probably mincing it might be easier, but then you have more moisture than grated carrot would provide. It would certainly be worth trying with the dry pulp though - good suggestion! I may try that next.

I used the dry pulp, because I had it to use. If you use whole root it will be a) moister, and b) sweeter than the pulp I used. I'm thinking adapting a buttermilk cake or scone type recipe might be more successful because of the extra moisture in the whole root - so you would use less of the other liquid to balance out.

My husband, as it turns out, is not a big fan of my cake (I'm not sure whether to be happy about that  - more for me?) he says he can taste parsnip in it (he is sensitive to and dislikes celery related plants) Maybe there is a fragrance to it, but too subtle for it to be really noticeable to me until he mentioned it. We've had skirret as a vegetable and he was fine with that, but maybe the flavour is concentrated in the dry pulp a bit.

Nancy Reading wrote:

Ac Baker wrote:Now I want to try making a yeast-raised bread with skirrit pulp, like porridge bread!!

Do you want me to send some pulp down to you? I have quite a bit left still

I'm almost tempted to say yes now, although it seems a bit impractical, given the less enthusiastic response of your taste tester: I suspect I'll be much keener than him! What do you think (knowing I love roast parsnips!)?