How to Use Salsify Part 1/2
So here’s is our yearly garlic, that we plant in November and now it’s March and in between these two beds here, it looks like it’s grass or weeds or what not and there are some weeds in there that I’d like to pull out, even though their very useful weeds. Such as yellow duck and chicory, but it’s not grass at all, this is salsify, very grass like leafs and if you look closely down at the base you can see that, you can tell that’s not a grass. And there’s a textural difference and the taste definitely will tell you it’s not a grass. And it took me a while to be able to tell the difference, one thing is that typically they’ll be like a little milky sap when you break a leaf off, especially from the root it bleeds a milky sap, but the good thing about these, salsify leaves are also edible. It looks like grass, not grass, can totally eat it and no matter what season it is, whether it’s seeding or flowering or whatever, it always is mild. So this is a great thing to add to salad, it’s nice and sweet, there’s almost no bitterness at all and you can eat it all year. At least here, in this climate you can. And so, I’ve notice that kids like it and another thing, another animal that lives in our garden that really likes the salsify are the chickens. And you can look here is where the chickens have eaten the salsify, so instead of being this big grass like plant, it’s very stunted, because it’s perpetually pecked by the chickens. And another thing they’ve done is through their scratching and various activities is they exposed the roots which is actually kind of hard to see here in this light but the root is actually exposed and so, it actually easier to harvest. So I’m gonna see if I can pull it out which you can almost never do with salsify, because, unless you grow it in really loose soil, well not so in here is extremely heavy clay. I did get the root, wow, so that is a salsify root, you just mashed it up and bake it like potatoes, or you can mashed it, there’s all kinds of recipes that you can use it for. But delicious, so the chickens, not only did they weed and fertilize and debug under our peach trees, but they also made salsify so that I can just pull it out of the ground instead of having to dig it, which you’ll see later. We look over at this one, you can kinda see that there's a root there and this heavy clay soil, you can almost never pull them out of the ground. You almost always have to dig and again it broke off and I have so much that it’s actually okay to waste a little bit of this, but you can see when you break off the root, it bleeds this milky white substance. And it’s pretty intense and it’s actually not bitter, it looks a lot like that milky substance that excreted by dandelions, related species, which are also in the same family, this is in the Asteracy family, or the sunflower or the daisy family and the white sap on the salsify, you can actually and it’s not bitter, it’s not like a dandelion at all. It’s actually quite interesting. It’s not bitter, but, it’s intense. I found that it doesn’t actually grow well when you plant it as when you just let it reseed, so, this salsify over here is a perpetual source of food, it probably makes more food than any other plant in our garden, and I don’t do anything to it except carefully don’t weed whack it. It looks a lot like grass and other weeds and a lot of times it grows right next to them, so you have just to be really kind of detailed when you go through and do your weeding to not pull it out, especially when it’s really young, when it’s really easy to miss. So, what I’m gonna do, so I’m gonna take this shovel and you can’t pull this out of the ground in this soil, the soil is way, way too hard and it’s heavy clay so you have to dig and you need to make sure you dig deep, coz you don’t break it off or sliced it off, because the root is very deep. I’m just gonna wedge it in, I’m just gonna rock it back and forth, until it gets really deep and then, pull. See a there’s a little bit of my scillium growing on there and you can see this is what our soil does here, it’s heavy, heavy clay. No kidding, so then it just kinda break apart until you find the roots and there’s one, and that’s a smaller root. But that’s still really good and you can actually just break that one off and kinda roast it whole and it be like a French fry. And here’s another one, and I did break it off at the end a little bit there, but that’s a nice one, cut that up just like and bake it or just fry it just like a potato. To me it taste like a cross between a potato and terra root, and of course that leaves are edible too, so you can add those to salads or eat them raw or feed them to the chickens. So, one other interesting thing is that, here the salsify, there’s like, this is actually three or four different plants all growing together like grass. You can just have lots of small roots and you don’t have to fend them at all, and these just came up on their own. I didn’t do anything, not even water them and let’s see, we’ll try to dig this clump up here. You can see what I’m talking about. The roots are all kind of growing, you have to break off all the, the dirt, but the roots are all growing, there’s one, close together. And they’re just as good and edible and tasty as when you thin them and get the big roots, and then you would thin them for commercial size, basically. But this is actually way more efficient and this is very similar to the way bulbs that the native Californians would eat and grow, such as bordea, they would have this very grass like leaves, it would be a whole field of them, but underneath the ground was all this amazing root food that you can eat. So, and that little patch right there, instead of getting one sort of co, market size tuber, or I mean root, you get several, and so, salsify, just chopped it up bake it like a potato, it’s delicious. One thing to note about the salsify root and eating them, they store well on the ground, they actually store them for months and months and months on the ground and still be just as delicious and edible and they don’t get tough or woody until the plant actually starts to flower and it actually got a very pretty flower, which is also edible and mild and good. But you don’t wanna leave them outside for very long, you want them in a plastic bag and put them in the fridge. Because they actually don’t keep very well at all outside the ground, they get really floppy and they kinda loose their flavor. So it’s best to keep them in the ground until you’re ready for them and then pick them and take them straight to the kitchen.