HOW TO BEGIN EATING SUNCHOKES

Sunchokes AKA Jerusalem Artichokes are one of those plants that are easy to grow, but they can be intimidating to start eating. After receiving some questions about how to eat them, I share my own personal advice about how to begin to enjoy this plant in your diet.

Since these tubers can be eaten raw, I suggest nibbling on a clean one and seeing if you enjoy the flavor. Personally, I think that they taste similar to carrots when eaten raw. Next, I suggest slicing and dicing some and simmering them in a pan. I used butter to fry these up, and withheld the seasoning, so I could actually get a baseline reading on the cooked flavor of them. Once they are cooked like this, I think that they taste somewhat similar to hashbrowns.

Now that I am familiar with the flavor, I plant on cooking them with eggs, featuring them in burritos, adding them to soups and stews, and periodically enjoying them raw too. One word of caution would be that some people call them "fartichokes" because they can make you gassy, much like beans are known to.