Friend of mine his dad was using the kitchen machine to grate it finely. He was wearing a chemical respirator mask when i popped around.
It\s used as a medicinal as well.
The flowers i’ve used in a sauce to put on salad.
One of those interesting tastes to add to an experimental wild salad with nuts and lard and dried fruit bits mixed with other wild edibles.. More or less edible sometimes, meaning non toxic and chewable. More non toxic and chewable than juicy and tasty and easy. A bit like an experience, like french cheese with red wine.
That stinky French cheese like Camembert which a smell that reminds you of your younger brother or nephews trainers he used to wear barefeet over the summer, never thinking of washing them.
People do funny things to get a kick. My French neighbor likes to put one of these Camemberts in the hot sun in a pan to melt and poor down his throat after a hard day of work in the hot sun. Don’t the Chinese bury eggs for a couple of years to have them after? Yep.
Adding horse radish to a salad is like a walk in the park and should be normalized. We must challenge our taste buds to be able to eat more wild stuff nature is offering us.
The healthiest veggies are out there, for free, while we wreck the planet putting poison on weak assed plants so tasteless and deficient of nutrients all bugs think they’re ill and must be irradicated. It’s the world upside down.
Society has trained us to do it.
In the middle ages it was common to have twenty spices in a dish.
We had peppery temperaments, character and stamina.
Where is all of that gone? Washed done a childlike addiction for eternal sugar kicks. An obese society of soft bellied, obedient kids waiting for the next sugar rush.
Ok rant is over.
Next time phone addictions.
Perhaps, it could also be that the healthiest veggies haven’t been bred yet! Plant Breeding can also enhance nutritution of already very highly nutritionist wild plants.
That being said there are some wild edibles that are Garbage, at best a cool to know & nothing useful but then there are some that are begging to be domesticated, grown, harvested, & seeds saved.
Wild Corn was among the lame wild barely edibles that we turned into one of the most consumed foods in the world, truly the possibilities are endless.
But does Horse Raddish taste Crazy HOT & Spicy? The smell of the root makes me turn away it’s so storng, perhaps better as a cooked green only? How do you eat it? What does it taste like?
I agree wild edibles should be more normalized & tended/cultivated too! Nature does offer us so many cool diverse flavors that I would’ve never tried from the grocery store, but not everything Nature offers is good. Some plants or just boring or nasty but others can kill you (Thankfully deadly poisonous plants aren’t the majority, but never eat anything you don’t know).
Thoroughly enjoyed this rant. Please continue! Start a tiktok!
My horseradish started flowering for the first time this year too. We’ll be watching for seeds. As far as eating it, it’s definitely not like eating a carrot or something sweet that you get full on, it’s more like a medicinal condiment, and the vast majority of commercial wasabi flavor if you look at the ingredients, is horseradish.
To me the flowers just taste like broccoli. The leaves are slightly spicy, with the horseradish flavor but very little heat. Last year I made fire cider and used the leaves since I had no root. Gave it an interesting kick without overwhelming the taste.
I’m guessing that the lack of viable seeds is a combination of thousands of years of cultivation, and the broccoli family’s tendency to be self incompatible. When working with a cloned plant, that can get tricky.
I suspect that those who get seeds either live in areas with compatible wild broccolis, or grow them.
wow! So would you say they are less hot than Brassica juncea? Those can sometimes be nose burning hot, same with Brassica nigra.
oh! It probably needs another genetic different clone to cross pollinate with. Restoring Horseradish fertility so I can do some good breeding work is something I want to do!
Well, that’s a dud for this season. My drunk neighbor decided to mow the horseradish. It might survive, but it was mowed right down to the ground. I had it surrounded by various barriers, and he decided to move them all to mow it.
So much for seeds. If it survives, maybe it will seed again next year.
It will survive, no worries
My horseradish is trying to make me a liar this year… it’s sending up bloom stalks. I cleared out all the competing weeds in the area, a dead branch removed off our willow last fall gave it a little more sunlight, and I’ve gotten ahead of the harlequin beetles to the point I don’t think there are any eggs (at least that I can see). The only thing bugging it is some caterpillars making a lovely meal out of some of the leaves, but otherwise it’s thriving. It will be interesting to see what the flower stalks do.