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

I have just managed to avoid deadly farts for the first time. I have placed sunchokes in a freezer for a week, then I have used them to make a cream soup. No farts at all, finally.

I just saw the title of the thread and had a good giggle. I thought it really say "science farts"
Must be my brain thinking sunchokes

@Fredy P: "I have fermented them in chunks with black pepper and lemon, delicious and no digestive problems. "

Now that these plants seem poised to make an all-out assault on the rest of our garden, could you please point me to a recipe for doing this, preferably in the jars from which they will be eaten?  Would be fun to give this a try....Thanks!

Hi John, it's so easy a recipe is not needed really. These are the proportions, which I usually upscale to 3 lb batches:

1lb sunchokes, scrubbed and cubed
1 tsp pink salt, kosher salt or sea salt (NO additives)
1 tbsp coarsely ground black pepper
Filtered (no chlorine!) water to cover
3 tbsp lemon juice
&
cheesecloth

Put all ingredients in a glass jar and cover with cheesecloth, leave to ferment 10 days at ideal temperature of 70 deg F. You'll probably need another day for every 3 degrees below that, to a minimum of 60 where you'd need a heating pad on low. Do not ferment above 85, gross things will outcompete the lactobacilli. It'll bubble and may get a film of yeasts on top.

Taste after 5-7 days to make sure it's proceeding alright. It's done when you like the taste and it's good & sour! Put in fridge, stores for up to 6 mo

Looking for a good picture of the 'sunflower with the edible root' which I was telling a coworker I just planted led me to this link http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/05/what-to-do-with-sunchokes.html#comments-297918 As much as we talk about growing these I'm seeing a grand total of two recipes here, so I thought maybe some more suggestions would be welcome. There are more recipes hidden in the comment section there.

I'm particularly interested in the 'twice baked' option. Boil the tubers till soft, smash them flat with the bottom of a pan and then pan fry with bacon, onions, garlic, and rosemary. I think you could make shoe leather tasty with that recipe.

edit: While I'm at it, here's five more recipes, including a soup http://www.thekitchn.com/tasty-tubers-5-recipes-with-su-129533

Recipe?

I literally just array them on a plate and nuke them until the insides are as buttery-soft as a well-roasted sweet potato or a roasted garlic clove.

The skin retains a fibrous chewiness and a bit of that flavor Joseph describes as resinous, but I don't mind it when accompanied by the sweet soft goo inside.  I just sprinkle with salt and eat.

If my eating scheme allowed for butter, i would surely put some on there.

Have you ever had those little yellow "Swede" potatoes shaped like bananas, that become sweet and buttery when well-cooked?  That's what the insides of sun chokes taste like to me after 8-10 minutes in the microwave.

As for "wind", I don't detect a difference.  But when you eat a plant-based diet full of legumes like I do, there's an overall fairly high level of digestive vigor going on, it takes something fairly spectacular to stand out as noise in the signal.

I want to create a demand for them in my family. I'm growing them in pots this year, but if I can find enough different ways my family likes to eat them, then we may devote a whole garden bed to them. For some reason I've really set my heart on getting them in that bed, so I'm already starting my recipe search.

Thanks for posting those links to recipes.  I think we have a lot of tubers in the garden, but so far I've not been good about cooking and serving them.  I'm always thrilled when something will grow and produce here, I'd hate to just waste this productivity because I failed to find a way to make them palatable.

I've tried roasting them (usually with other root veggies) but never really cared for them that way.  I found them to be their most palatable after a long simmer in a pot of soup.

When I was still living in Seattle, I went to a fancy new vegan restaurant and eagerly ate a dish featuring sunchokes. Delicious! So tasty! And the next day, I felt like Violet Beauregard from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, slowly inflating to perfect roundness. I've never been so horrendously bloated in my life. No more sunchokes for me! Darn.

It might be a problem of too much too soon. You may need to acclimate to them. Or you can still grow them and feed them to your animals.

yeah... Sunchokes are a "sometimes" food. I second the recommendation of starting slowly.  Small amounts are probably a good idea until your gut bacteria can adjust to the new starches.  I've never had the gas issue but I never eat sunchokes as a side dish.  I look at them as a condiment more or less like fried onion strings. Good on a salad for sure.  

I probably have  a couple hundred pounds of sunchokes each year.  I feed most of them to pigs and chickens.  My family and I might eat a couple pounds each year.  The main reason I have them is to catch nutrient at the lower areas of my land.  I have them as part of a swale system and a windbreak so what's above ground is just as valuable as what's below ground.  The dead stalks are great to add to the chicken coop bedding or as mulch on annual garden beds.

Craig, do you feed the whole tubers to the chickens, or do you process them in any way?

Tyler Ludens wrote:Craig, do you feed the whole tubers to the chickens, or do you process them in any way?

I just throw extra tubers into the next paddock for the chickens.  It's usually an area that's been worked over by pigs, so any tubers that don't get eaten, usually root and grow in the upturned ground.  I chuck them in whole.  

That's great, thanks!  

How much space do I actually need for sunchoke? I bought a pound of the red on amazon,have them in pots waiting to sprout. May be unnecessary but I can't decide where I want them. Do goats find the plants overly delicious? Have to decide if they can grow on my garden fence.
I have 2 lbs. I'm not sure how they will do,I'm in the "Coastal plain"  of NC but just outside of the Sandhills region and a few miles from SC.
I also bought yacon bought did t catch that what  I was ordering were storage tubers rather than the planting ones. Will these not sprout? If so, anybody know where I can buy or trade some from?

I plant sunroots 18" apart in the rows, with 5 feet between rows.

I wonder if adding spices or herbs would help with the bloating/gas issue. Like beans with savory?! I am thinking fennel, savory, juniper, etc. that aids digestion...
Anybody experienced with that?

I'd definitely be willing to grow them as bird food! Sounds like they'd be great for that purpose. They sure are pretty.

Noob to the forum. Hello all.
Had a red, knobby type Sunchoke back on the farm when I was a kid. The tops grew about 5' to 6' tall, flowered very little. The tubers were sort of knobby, but not grossly knobby. They tasted sweet and nutty raw and Mom never cooked with them. I'd pull them and snack on them in the fall and spring.
Now, years later, I'm on a lot and a half in town, growing three varieties.
I found a feral type along a road in the country several years ago. They grow 12' plus tall with white, straight, smooth tubers about 6" to 8" long and 3/4" to 1" in diameter. They have a very faint turnipy taste, stink when cooked unless they're dried first, then there's no stink, just good flavor. Their flowers are so tough they can't be chewed raw. I boiled 3 quarts this fall, strained the liquid off and made wine. While cooking, they smelled exactly like squash. I just bottled the wine and I'm letting it age. It has a different smell for sure, heavy, musky, what I'd call an earthy smell, not bad, just very different. I also used the left over water from cooking the ones we canned for wine. I was really wondering how that was going to turn out because as the water cooled, it jelled, solid. I had dropped in a few dozen raisins for natural yeast and had stirred them through the water before it jelled. It took about a week and the jell liquified and it began working just fine. Because the inulin breaks down slowly, its still working 3 months later.
I ordered some white knobby ones a year later and I've just started harvesting them all this year. We canned some, just like potatoes, canned some bread and butter pickles (Yum!!) and canned some more with some Taco seasoning (Also Yum!). Their flowers are tender enough to toss in salads and taste just like the roots. These ones grow 5' to 6' tall. The tubers have a slightly sweet, almost regular potato taste.
A year ago I noticed some in a small flower bed in town and bummed three tubers. The people had no idea what they had. I dug them and spread them out this fall. They're red, knobby and larger than the white ones with tops around 6' tall. I haven't sampled them yet. I'm hoping they're like the ones I knew as a kid.
I bought a cheap electric mulcher and chop the tops right back into the plots and turn them in as I dig the tubers.
I'm in west-central Pennsylvania, zone 5, and I'm looking around for more ideas for storing, dehydrating and eating these things!
I also saw an old thread about Sunchokes crowding out brambles and that got me wondering if anyone has tried to crowd out Japanese Knotweed with them? I don't have any on my property, but around town there are several places that have been taken over by Knotweed. A relative's property near here is also being taken over by Knotweed so we may try it out and see how it goes in a couple years, if she wants the Sunchokes that is.

I have finally found a way to eat my sunchokes without a gas mask afterwards ;) Fermenting seems to work just fine. Either sliced tubers, or whole, both work. Sliced one are ready in less than a week, for whole ones I had to wait a bit longer. I have used just salted water and some spices.

I'm not seeing Latin names used in this thread, but from my understanding:

Helianthus annuus = Sunflower
Helianthus strumosus = Sunroot
Helianthus tuberosus = Jerusalem Artichoke or Earthpear or Sunchoke(?)

It's probably the English language that fails to make a clear distinction between Helianthus strumosus and Helianthus tuberosus, and they are very alike, but I like to say the Earthpear is a more cultivated, civilised version of a Sunroot. The Sunroot has a wilder set of tubers that are more slender in shape. They are not so easy to harvest. The flower stalks are less tall than that of the Earthpear.
The Earthpear is more common, and understandably so, as it behaves much better. A more compact cluster of tubers that are individually also more compact in shape.

What is also often said is that the Earthpear doesn't bloom so reliably as the Sunroot, but it just so happens that in my first season growing both it were the Earthpears who flowered best, even the ones in a less sunny position. My Sunroots took until October before starting flowering, and that didn't come to much anymore, as October is very late in the season here.
When it comes to taste I can't tell a difference.
Obviously there are differences in varieties when it comes to how they grow. 'Topstar' is the name of the variety of Earthpear I have, 'Aurora Rubin' is the variety of Sunroot I have. 'Topstar' is a very compact grower, 'Aurora Rubin' has red tubers.

I hope I'm not confusing matters with these names, I suspect also commercial growers in some cultures are only using one popularised name?

I've been digging into the 'results' of eating Sunchokes because of their inulin and I've stumbled onto little tidbits regarding the balance of flora in the gut and over-all health. In particular I just found this about how gut flora affects the brain and how inulin can alter that balance for the better; Nemechek protocol search on YouTube.

In my vocabulary, I use the term "sunroot" as a generic description to label  any Helianthus species that produces edible tubers. I also use "sunroot" to describe the inter-species hybrids.