During the 2020 garden season, sunchokes (you may have heard them called Jerusalem artichokes) were our wild-card plant. They eat/cook much like a potato but look more like ginger.
They grow in the ground like potatoes. After the growing season is over, we dug them out of the ground. One noticeable difference in the garden is that the plant of a sunchokes is very tall (up to 10’) and almost looks like a sunflower. Because of this, we planted them in the far west row of our garden so it would shade less plants.
After being harvested in the fall, the uncleaned sunchokes were placed in a tote layered with the same soil they grew in to preserve them. When we want to cook some, we go out to the tote and pull a few out from the soil. This has been great for the last four months, but they will not last forever this way. We can eat them in different recipes and save some to be replanted in the spring, but there are still far too many, so we needed to do something with the extra. First, Greg thought of canning them like we did the potatoes, but that didn’t seem like a smart choice since nearly everything we could find on the internet strongly suggested that sunchokes not be pressure canned. After doing some additional research, we discovered it would be best to pickle and water bath them.
The process was very tedious. They first had to be individually scrubbed which was a huge pain. The crevasses of dirt are incredible. Scrubbing by hand took hours. We then ordered what looks like a toilet brush and hooked it on a high-powered drill. We filled a utility sink full of sunchokes and water and let the drill and ‘toilet brush’ do most of the work. It’s not perfect, but this method was much faster than doing them individually by hand. Once clean, we then cut them into half inch chunks and soaked them in a home-made vinegar brine for over 72 hours.
Next, the chunks are loaded into quart-sized canning jars which are then filled with a home-made pickling solution which consists of different vinegars and seasoning. The jars were then water-bathed for fifteen minutes. After they cooled, we cleaned the tops and labeled them. They need to rest on the shelf for at least two weeks before they can be eaten.
Just this week, about a month after they were canned, we opened our first jar. Our verdict is…Mixed. Greg likes them, he says they are nice and crunchy like a pickle. Emily thinks they are okay, but do not have much flavor. Next time you are at the Ranch we will open a jar and you can try them for yourself.
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