Digging Up Dinner

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 Indians 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 shadeless 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.  It’s not necessary to wait as long as we did, but it is best to 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 resprout 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, you can do with the sunchoke; you just have to account for their lower starch content. They have affinities with goat cheese and hazelnuts, and with lemon and morels.” Sunchokes also pair well with tarragon, the only herb in the sunflower family.