Welcome to Stocking Up, a new online column in which we reveal which products you should be looking for at the market right now. From fresh fruits and veggies to olive oils and sodas, we’ll tell you where to get them and how to pick out the best ones – we even suggest ways to add them to your cooking repertoire. The beige tubes resting in a basket at the Biver Farms stand may look like fresh gingerroot but these gnarled knobs are in fact, sunchokes. Or Jerusalem artichokes. Or even sunroots. Whatever name you use, you’ll certainly find these roots of a particular sunflower species to be delicious.
Brett Palmier of Biver Farms advised that the sunchokes have a taste and texture similar to that of a potato. “They’re about as natural as you can get,” he said, noting that sunchokes are one of the few edible plants actually indigenous to the Northern Plains. They can be eaten raw in salads or, when roasted and blended with a little cream, make an unusual and tasty soup.
Palmier’s sunchokes are harvested in the early fall, before they have a chance to develop a thick skin. So if you pick some up from him at the Maplewood, Goshen or Tower Grove markets, you won’t need to peel them. Buy at the grocery store, however, and you’d best have your peeler handy. “Bigger farms harvest them in the spring, which means they probably need peeling,” he noted. Although there’s not a lot of taste difference between the bigger and smaller sunchokes, the larger ones tend to be slightly easier to scrub.
Sunchokes should be available, by whatever name, until the end of the market season in October.
– Shannon Parker
This article appears in Sep 1-30, 2010.