Dandelions

As we begin to eat the very first produce from our summer garden, we focus on one of our easiest and most beneficial “crops”: dandelions.

As most people know, dandelions are not native to North America. Early settlers from Europe introduced them here, bringing them with them as an important food source. This seems almost impossible now that the plant has become one of our most virulent and reviled weeds. However, just because most gardeners hate them doesn’t mean their food value has diminished in any way.

The dandelion: delicious, nutritious, and SO easy to grow! (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).

The dandelion: delicious, nutritious, and SO easy to grow! (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).

We’ve eaten dandelions on and off for years. Long ago, we picked the flower stems and split them open so we could thoroughly wash out the bitter white sap inside. This gave us a crisp, fresh, almost fruit-like additive to salads and the like. This turns out to be an extremely narrow, limited use of an excellent food source. Now that we know more about them, we make a point of eating dandelions in a variety of ways.

Our enthusiasm grew after reading The Dandelion Celebration: A Guide to Unexpected Cuisine by Peter Gail (paid link) (check your local independent bookstore). This book offers exhaustive praise for dandelions. If only half of the book’s claims are true, we should all be eating dandelions whenever we can! At the risk of being too brief, dandelions are apparently an incredibly healthy food for humans.

This book urges dandelion eaters to harvest the parts of the plant before flowers form, to avoid the bitterness. It also offers various ways to mitigate the bitterness. We try not to bother with that for the simple reason that we find it too limiting. The advantage of wild greens comes from the freedom from cultivation requirements; if we get too picky about harvest periods or other plant management, it becomes another garden plant.

Instead, we accept that, like most wild greens, dandelions will have a strong flavor. If we intend to eat dandelions, we need to accustomize our tastes to the flavors through consumption.

We learned this trick from an alternative toothpaste that uses fewer sweeteners. The “instructions” on the toothpaste point out because most of us have grown accustomed to highly sweetened toothpastes (usually with high fructose corn syrup) users will not like the toothpaste at first. They recommend using it a few times to grow accustom to it. We did that, and now, if I have to use regular commercial toothpaste, I feel like I’m brushing my teeth with cake frosting!

After a few summers of eating dandelion greens, the bitterness seems part of the flavor. We’d be lost without it! That frees us from the more limited harvest period and the extra work required to mitigate the bitterness.

Other than the obvious, using dandelions in salads, we like to use them as many Italians do, adding a large handful of leaves to our pasta a few minutes before its finished cooking. This adds considerable vegetable food value to our spaghetti. We hardly notice the flavor in a good, spicey pasta sauce, but we appreciate the texture.

We have not yet expanded dandelion use in two very obvious directions: I have not tried making coffee substitute with roasted dandelion root, nor have I made dandelion wine. I intend to try the latter, at least, but that requires careful timing for optimum results. I’ll have to plan for that one carefully, perhaps next year.

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2 Responses to Dandelions

  1. Angie says:

    I grew up eating dandelion greens (yes, raised in the woods by wolves), but my family only picked them very early in the season, when they were still tender and only mildly bitter. We only ate them one way: boiled, then dressed with lemon juice. My personal favorite use is to chop them fine and add to humus; the bitterness there is perfect. And, PS, making your own coffee substitute isn’t worth the effort. I speak from experience.

  2. Mark Zeiger says:

    Angie, we definitely try to get them early, tender and sweet, too, but learning to like the bitterness helps stretch the season so much. Plus, you know us–we don’t always get around to the proper seasons in time! Adding them to hummus sounds great! We’re likely to try that today.

    I, of course, have always been appalled by any coffee substitutes, particularly dandelion root. Recently, I read something that opened my mind to the possibility of substitutes, but I can’t for the life of me recall what or where I learned about it! However, after a childhood of digging dandelion roots for the sake of nice lawns and “weed” free gardens, I figure there must be easier ways to get a bad cup of coffee. Probably more rewarding to dig the root, then brew the accumulated dirt into a facsimile (my sincere apologies to those readers who might actually make and enjoy dandelion/chicory root coffee).

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