Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Kinpira Gobo, burdock

Burdock root and carrot. I never heard of burdock and I wanted to watch videos of how it is cooked. Apparently it's used a lot medicinally. You can buy a lot of health products for various things. But in the U.S. the root is not a common food item. So, to buy some to try it you must go to an Asian market. In Denver, people mentioned it in reviews of Asian markets.

I'm showing this video for only one reason. The mother cracks me up. The son asks her, "Did you learn cooking from someone?" Expecting her to say she learned from her mother she says instead, "I went to a famous cooking school for awhile." For some reason that strikes me as hilarious. Her sons did not know that about her.

"Mum, did Nana teach you how to cook?" (Of course she did) "No. Nana was a terrible cook. I attended Le Cordon Bleu. See my knife kit?"

The taste is described various ways, earthy, like truffles. It sounds interesting.



Judging by YouTube videos, the westerners have it all wrong. They're lost. 90% of the videos are about foraging wild burdock, how to identify the plant, and how to dig out the yard-long root. At tremendous expense of energy they dig around the plant's root. The gardens with burdock did not prepare the soil with harvesting in mind, and the roots are all wonky, short, and scraggly.

Grown commercially in Japan, the ground is first prepared to be loose very deeply to assist the root-pulling at harvest, sometimes the roots two yards (meters) long. Straight as swords. Being obsessive compulsive maniacs, naturally, they try for three-meter roots. But with the soil prepared properly, the harvesting is easier than shown in all the other videos by western farmers and foragers. This video is the closest I found. 

It's similar to daikon farming and harvesting. (Sound of the machine. Turn down volume) 



I want to try it. Maybe it'll block antioxidants, whatever those are.

4 comments:

AllenS said...

If you are going to try it, you have to eat it when the plant is very young. If you wait until it is mature, it will turn into cockelbur. A real pain in the ass if the burs get on your clothes.

LINK TEXT

Dad Bones said...

I never knew they could be eaten but I've come back from walks in the country and found my pant leg covered with them and don't remember it happening.

My dad would drag my brother and me out to the bean fields on hot mornings to hoe out cockleburrs and sunflowers. We took along a big plastic thermos with water and as many ice cubes we could cram into it which always melted, and also a file to keep the hoes sharp. These days, for better or worse, they're controlled with herbicides and GMO seeds.

AllenS said...

Cockelbur is real tough on dogs and cats, especially if they have long hair. Same thing with a horse's mane or tail.

Dad Bones said...

I'd forgotten about that and I used to spend a lot of time trying to pull them out of our dog's shaggy ears.