Digging Up Dinner
story by Donna Hecker and photography by Talitha Schroeder
It’s still February; how does your garden grow? David Wagoner and the Holly Hill Inn gardeners have already planted radishes and turnips, carrots and beets, all for eating; and poppies for the dining room. Lettuces are growing in the greenhouse and will soon make the transition to soil. And with luck, the radishes will be ready for picking in just a few short weeks.
But lest we were in danger of getting ahead of ourselves with all that planting, someone remembered a crop still in need of digging up after its winter layover. It was time to unearth the sunchokes.
Helianthus tuberosus, according to the New Phytological Foundation, originated in the central and eastern parts of our present-day United States, has a rich connection to the early native people who cultivated it, and “represents one of the few domesticates that can support eastern North America as one of the world's cradles of domestication.”
Pretty heady stuff for a lowly tuber, one that many have never heard of, even by its common names – sunchoke, girasole, Jerusalem artichoke – let alone eaten. But it’s native to Kentucky, especially along the Ohio River, as well as to many of our neighboring states; and was once widely grown and consumed.
Helianthus tuberosus is a perennial sunflower which Cree and Huron tribes grew for its large tubers, that they called respectively “askipaw” and “skibwan”, meaning raw thing. In the 1600s, the plant was transplanted to the Old World where it took on the names we know it by today and proved a popular food, at least until it was supplanted a century later by potatoes, another New World export.
We grew a nice little stand of Helianthus in a plot that was once a shade garden until rendered treeless by a freak wind storm. Those plants topped out around ten feet tall and provided beautiful yellow blooms for our vases all summer long. Then came fall, then winter, and luckily our gardeners remembered the sunflowers had one more gift to give.
So in early February, they went out and dug up the stalks for their tubers, picking out the largest for the kitchen and returning the rest to the garden. You don’t have to wait as long as we did, but you should let a few frosts go by. In fact, David says the tubers can be left in the ground all winter and harvested as needed, and will eventually re-sprout as spring returns.
When we surveyed our gardener friends about the plant, a few told us they eat the tubers, sometimes pickled and sometimes in a pan roast, while at least one grows it exclusively for the flowers. If you’d like to try growing Helianthus, consider David’s suggestion to plant it adjacent to the garden, in a spot you don’t necessarily want to cultivate all the time, and to support the spindly stalks with bamboo.
After you’ve enjoyed the cheerful yellow flowers of Helianthus, and the stalks have been cut back, leave them as they are and make a mental note to revisit them in mid-winter to harvest the tubers. And once you’ve dug up enough for dinner, and are wondering what to do with them, Holly Hill Executive Chef Tyler McNabb has a few ideas: gratinéed, braised in stock, puréed into a creamy soup, roasted with mushrooms and garlic.
“Basically anything that can be done with a potato, can also be done with the sunchoke; you just have to account for their lower starch content. They have affinities for goat cheese and hazelnuts, and lemon and morels.” Sunchokes also pair well with tarragon, the only herb in the sunflower family.
Nutritionally, sunchokes contain a high concentration of inulin, a water-soluble prebiotic which helps beneficial bacteria thrive in the digestive system. Because inulin itself is indigestible, it helps to slowly build up a tolerance by consuming small quantities of inulin-containing foods.
In her illuminating cookbook Vegetable Literacy, Deborah Madison arranged vegetables by botanical family. Sunchokes were grouped with their kin in a chapter subtitled “Some Rough Stuff From Out of Doors.” An apt description for a foodstuff that spends most of its time buried in the dirt, needs a heavy frost or two to become companionable, and reacts positively to an acid bath.
As you plan your summer garden, look ahead to winter and consider growing a little rough stuff of your own. It may well turn out to be buried treasure one hungry day.
Related Content
Sunchoke Toastie
A hearty snack or light meal for one or two that's an easy and tasty intro to sunchokes. It's beautifully scented with fresh tarragon and a splash of dry vermouth and comes together quickly in the skillet.
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