All About Yacon

I’ve been bandicooting the yacon for months now, but this morning I harvested the rest – over 10 kg from about 2.5m² of garden bed. I figure counting the bandicooting, the yield was up around 5kg per square metre. And that was from a less than ideal bed in dappled shade for most of the day with no additional water.

That’s an impressive yield. It takes a whole season to get there, but that’s impressive enough to win it a bed to itself even in my tiny suburban garden.

The tubers are sweet and crisp and very good for you. My grandkids love eating fresh yacon just as is, peeled and eaten like an apple straight from the hand. We adults eat it mostly finely sliced in salads, or as batons in stir fries, or roasted along with the carrots and beets and khol rabi. It works perfectly for that bit of crunch in a salad in the part of the year when cucumbers are not in season, and it holds its crunch in stir fries and roasted. Yacon is very low GI and very high in fructans, which is a kind of sugar that isn’t digested in the small intestine but instead travels on to the large intestine where it feeds good bacteria and gut microflora. And there’s oodles of evidence now about how important the gut microbiome is for everything from mental health to immunity and weight loss to arthritis.

So all in all, worth having in the garden.

Growing

Yacon (Smallanthus sonchifolius) is daisy family, related to sunflowers and to Jerusalem artichokes, (and the plants do remind me of artichokes). It was originally cultivated in the Andes of South America, but it will cope with climates from Atherton tableland to Tasmania. The yield is best with some compost and enough water, and I add a cover of mulch to slow down evaporation, but it’s pretty drought resistant and resilient. It would no doubt prefer a bed in full sun but in my garden it has to make do with one that is dappled shade for much of the day.

When you harvest yacon, you find a crown of purple rhizomes around the bottom of the stem, and under them, the big, pale, crisp water filled tubers that you harvest to eat. The eating tubers can’t be planted, and the purple rhizomes are not nice to eat. The crown of purple rhizomes can be split apart – just one corm from it will grow a new plant. So every grower is likely to have purple rhizome corms to spare this time of year – to start your yacon growing addiction, just find someone already growing it. If your garden is frost free, you can plant them straight away but they won’t do anything much till spring. Or you can pot the corms up, or keep them in a pot of wet sand till spring.

By midsummer, they will be two-metre tall, lanky, multi-stemmed plants. By mid autumn they will be flowering (and, if I am impatient I can start bandicooting, but these early ones are a bit tasteless compared to later ones). The flowers are attractive enough but not very significant. By mid-winter the plant will have died back and I dig the bed up, and harvest enough to keep us supplied with fresh yacon through to mid-spring, and syrup for the whole year. I have a frost-free climate, but in places with frost you will need to harvest before the first heavy frost – the tubers will not cope with freezing. I keep them in a basket for a few days to harden up and sweeten, then in the fridge.

Storing

They’ll keep for a few months in the fridge but though I don’t begrudge them garden space, I’m not about to devote fridge space to 10kg of yacon. The kids get through them as snacking food pretty fast, and I give some away, but 3kg of this lot was turned into syrup, which reduces it to one small bottle of sweet, malty, mollasses-like deliciousness for drizzling on pancakes or yoghurt or adding to sauces and marinades. And another 2kg was turned into flour to be added to my Seedy Sourdough Crispbreads, just to add a bit extra gut microbiome support.

Making the syrup is very easy. Just peel and chop the yacon and put them through a blender or juicer to extract the juice. (I used a blender, poured the pulp into a cheescloth bag and squeezed.) They’re very juicy, so 3 kg of yacon yielded 2 litres of juice. The juice is dark brown with a green tinge and mildly sweet but not that interesting. But if you simmer it for a long time (a slow cooker is perfect for this) to reduce it to a syrup consistency, it becomes something like mollasses flavoured maple syrup. Two litres of juice reduced to 300ml of syrup.

The flour is even easier – slice and dehydrate, then blitz dehydrated slices to a (very small volume of) powder in the food processor. Store in a jar, and it will last longer on the shelf than I can test.