Dig In! Fall Roots: Burdock, Queen Anne’s Lace, Field Garlic

November 20, 2019

Here's another post on “how I’d be preparing for winter (if the grocery store weren’t a five-minute walk away).” We’ve talked about drying (fruit leather, flour), nuts, and pickling. But Nature has another storage system: Roots. Perennial and biennial plants with taproots, bulbs, and tubers spend the summer gathering energy from the sun and storing it as starch and sugar below ground, in preparation for sending up new leaves and flowers in the spring. We humans can take advantage of Nature’s storage plan; in fact, our ancestors have done so for eons. Did your grandparents have a root cellar?

End of season, these large leaves are still identifiable as Burdock. Note the velvety white underside on the leaf to the left.

I’ve been looking forward to digging Burdock root ever since I heard that it’s a standard vegetable in Asian markets, where it’s known as Gobo. I’ve also been thinking about digging Queen Anne’s Lace, also known as Wild Carrot, because—well—if I were storing vegetables in a root cellar, wouldn’t I want some carrots to flavor my soup?

Those characteristic burrs, which so craftily attach to our coats and pets' fur, make it easy to identify the plant in fall

Many roots are best dug after the first hard frost, as the starches are converted to sugars and the veggies become sweeter. I was worried that I might be too late: Once the leaves died back, it might be pretty difficult to find the plants I was looking for. But not to fear! I had been mentally marking these plots all summer, so even though it was late in the season, I found enough leaf to identify the plants I was looking for.

Word to the wise: Bring the right tools. Burdock roots can grow up to two feet long. There was no way these guys were going to surrender easily. With my (landlord's) pathetic shovel (all my tools are in storage), I was able to dig perhaps eight inches into the ground, but inevitably ended up slicing through the root. I even tried digging with my hands (the soil was sandy--why didn’t I bring a trowel?) and really didn’t get much further.

The good news is that even if you can only get 4-6 inches of the root, you’ve got a pretty substantial amount of food. I’ve since read that you can actually dig Burdock early in the summer, when the roots aren’t so brawny, and this might be my approach in future seasons.

The Carrots were much more cooperative. I dug the shovel in near the plant’s crown, loosening the dirt, and then the roots pulled out pretty easily. Queen Anne’s Lace does have a few poisonous look-alikes, so it’s important to know what you’re digging. However, the scent of carrot when you walk on them is divinely unmistakable. I noticed that the leaves looked like parsley, so when I got home I looked them up; indeed, carrots are in the parsley family (along with a bunch of poisonous cousins!).

One thing I've found is that it’s a bad idea to prepare all the fruits of my foraging in one way. The recipes I find in books (and on the internet, surprise, surprise!) sometimes don’t work out as promised, and I end up wishing I hadn’t used up all my gleanings in one (failed) recipe.

Scraping the peel off Burdock root--a technique the Japanese call Sasagaki

So I approached my roots creatively. Here’s a plate that shows Burdock cooked three ways—boiled, roasted, and fried. Boiled burdock? Yuck. Roasted and dried, it could become a starchy storage food to be incorporated into soups and stews as a tasty thickener. Roasted with oil and sprinkled with salt, this yummy root could actually give potatoes a run for their money--a nice substitute for roasted or hash browned spuds.

Sometimes when experimenting with new approaches, you discover something unexpected. Pictured next to the Burdock is roasted Wild Carrot--the curly dark brown threads in the upper left corner. The roots were too delicate to peel (as you would a domestic carrot); instead I scratched off dirty-looking parts with my thumb nails to remove grit (I’m fortunate to have very tough thumb nails), tossed them with oil and seasoning, and put them in the oven with their small roots attached. Addictive! Crunchy, salty, carroty, yummy. Trust me--even your kids would love these.

Field Garlic. These bulbs are tiny, about the size of q-tips or smaller. The leaves look like bright green grass.

Another root I found: Field Garlic. I plan to write more about this delicacy in the coming months. The leaves smell like onion, but if you look closely at its tiny little bulbs, you can see that it separates into little cloves, each with their own papery skin, just like its grown-up, store-bought, big sister!

I made a wonderful soup of these three root vegetables, which I’m going to call Kathleen’s Fall Root Tonic. Chicken broth, root vegetables, a tablespoon of fish sauce for salt (miso would have worked just as well). Last minute, I added some Nettle greens to further fortify the health benefits. I wished I’d had some mushrooms to throw in, but even without, it was delicious.

Kathleen's Fall Root Tonic with Burdock, Wild Carrot, Field Garlic, and Nettles

Back to Gobo, or Burdock root. I found a wealth of recipes online incorporating Gobo; not surprising given its popularity in Asia. The recipe that caught my eye was Kinpira

Gobo—Stir-fried Burdock and Carrots--from one of my favorite food bloggers, thespruceEats (kinpira gobo recipe here). I had to make a bunch of substitutions. Given the small amount of Burdock and Queen Anne’s Lace root I had (after my other experiments--maybe one cup total), I adapted the seasonings likewise, and used one teaspoon each of vegetable oil, sesame oil, red wine (in place of the sake), sugar, soy sauce, and rice wine vinegar (in place of mirin).

The results? Being wild rather than farm-raised, my roots were a little woody, but I would not have been the least bit disappointed to have been served this dish in a pan-Asian restaurant. Steven and I started eating it as a side dish with some take-out ramen, but then realized it was great as another addition to the soup.

Fall roots. Dig in!