The other day, I posted a video of foraging and processing kudzu roots to a group I’m a part of. A few friends seemed interested — one messaged me that they knew of a potential patch. That weekend, armed with trowels, bags, and gloves, we set out to track us down some kudzu.
If you’re in the southeastern US and you do any kind of gardening, the word “kudzu” may well strike fear into your heart. As Nature.org‘s “Kudzu: The Invasive Vine that Ate the South” puts it, “kudzu is quite a killer, overtaking and growing over anything in its path.” Drive down a highway, and it’s not uncommon to see it choking out trees, climbing over fences, and dragging down powerlines.
In short, we were more than happy to learn how to eat some.
In its native range, kudzu is still an aggressive grower. It’s not invasive, of course, because a native plant by definition can’t be invasive. One of the things that helps keep kudzu in balance is the fact that it’s useful as a food and medicinal plant. People regularly harvest it to eat as a root vegetable and process into starch.
There’s only one problem: It was very early spring. There were no leaves on anything. Identifying it meant looking for a specific kind of brown twig in a mass of other brown twigs, then trying to follow it back to the ground, dig there for a while, and hope it had led to something resembling a kudzu root. Fortunately, kudzu doesn’t have many lookalikes, and its hairy stems and growth habit help to differentiate it.
Also, kudzu roots get enormous.
My Handsome Assistant is a powerlifter. Even with him pulling and our friend and me digging, it still took a lot of time to liberate several fairly small roots. Still, it was a success and, I figured, I decent amount for a first attempt. Nothing we’d have to bust out a table saw to cut through. Just enough to hopefully end up with some starch (and give us the opportunity to decide if it was worth the effort).
Tl;dr, I’m probably just going to make them into a stew next time. Maybe paper.
Processing the kudzu roots involved scrubbing them well, peeling away their tougher, fibrous outsides, cutting them into chunks, and pureeing them well with plenty of water. Once pureed, we strained the pulp, squeezed it out, rinsed it, squeezed it out again, and poured the liquid into large jars to let the starch settle to the bottom.
It was that last bit that proved the most problematic.
See, we’d hoped to get the roots before they used their stored energy (in other words, starch) to put out a flush of new spring growth. However, the roots we got were small and fairly skinny (which is probably for the best — we might’ve needed a backhoe for big ones). The little bit of starch that settled out ended up lost during the refinement and decanting process.
Still! It was an interesting learning experience. I’d definitely change how we did some things (like I mentioned, I’d love to try preparing the smaller roots in other ways, like roasting or stewing). I also have a mold and deckle and, considering that starch is used as sizing for papermaking, I’d like to try using the pulp to extract most of the starch and, rather than discarding/composting the pulp, see how it works in paper.
I’ve also heard that the flowers smell like grape candy and can make a jam that tastes like something between apple and peach. Since I’ve had really good results making rose petal confiture, I’m excited to try making some with kudzu flowers.
So, obtaining some kudzu starch may have been a bust this time, but I have ideas!
Marble Crow 