Transcription
The truth about Kudzu, America's most invasive plant, is that it may just be one of the most significant and versatile sources of wild food that we have here. It can be used as an emergency food and as a long-term staple wild food that is shelf-stable. Almost every part of it is edible: the tender shoots in early spring, as well as the flowers later on into summer.
But today, we are talking about the tuberous roots, which contain one of the highest quality starches in the entire world. I'm serious. Michelin-star chefs will actually seek out Kudzu starch specifically because it has amazing properties, and it far outperforms other common starches for things like frying, for thickening soups, for making desserts, and some other crazy recipes that we're going to explore together.
In addition, traditionally, Kudzu is regarded as a healthful, vitalizing food in East Asia, where it's native to, and it is very nutritive. They've known about and used this plant for thousands of years, and I think that it's high time that we here in North America take some notes.
However, if you were going to try to buy Kudzu starch online, you would pay a very hefty premium, costing over eight times as much as corn starch. So, forget about that, because extracting the precious starch from the roots is way easier than most people make it out to be. I've now spent dozens of hours with this wild food, honing my methods, and in this video, I'm going to show you absolutely everything that you need to know to forage for Kudzu starch. So, let's go over our agenda today.
First, we will learn how to identify the plant, even when it's completely dormant. You'll learn why that's important in a second. Second, we're going to learn where, when, and how to find the root-bearing crowns in the middle of a massive, tangled field. Third, we'll go over how to gather the roots out of the ground. Fourth, how to extract, process, and clarify the starch at home. Fifth, I will show you how to cook with it and some amazing recipes where Kudzu really shines. And finally, this one right here, I'm going to show you how to distinguish it from a very important, potentially dangerous look-alike that could be sneakily kind of hidden amongst the Kudzu vines that you do not want to mistake it for or even really be digging around.
So, with that, let's begin. And remember, as usual, you don't have to worry about memorizing all the details I'm going to show you in this video, because I've put it all in a downloadable guide just for you.
Okay, let's talk about identifying this plant when they don't have any leaves on them and they're completely dormant. The most obvious detail by far would be the growth habit. I mean, just looking at this field in front of me, it is a solid block of tangled Kudzu that has completely taken over, and I don't know much else that can really do that. So that's a big giveaway.
But beyond that, the way in which Kudzu grows and spreads, it really likes to kind of twine and twist around everything around it, including itself. But there are a few other very distinctive, more detailed characteristics that we can be looking for to be absolutely sure that we have found Kudzu.
So, here's a big grouping of younger vines, and you can't quite tell this from further away, but if you get up close, you can see that they have a bunch of very fine, fuzzy hairs growing along them, and those are actually quite irritating if they get directly on your skin, which is why when I'm handling them, I'm always wearing these gloves right here. As those vines become more mature, they will become a little bit darker in color overall, and they'll lose those hairs. I would call the color something like a gray-brown or so, but they will have a bunch of very obvious, light, raised bumps on them that are called lenticels.
The leaf scars on Kudzu are large and relatively obvious, especially if you're looking for them. Right below these leaf scars or these branching scars and along the stem, they will be alternating. And you won't always find these, especially later on into the dormancy of this plant, but here are the bean-like seed pods of Kudzu, and they are just extremely distinctive. They have a very dark outer coating on them and an extremely hairy, almost woolly set of hairs on the outside that are kind of like almost a yellow-orange color to them. They really, really stand out if you do find them.
That's it. That's how to recognize Kudzu. Relatively straightforward, I would say. But don't forget that later on in the video, we do need to at least be aware of that look-alike that can be hidden amongst the Kudzu vines.
Now, the question is, where, and more importantly, when should we be looking for Kudzu? Well, this plant really needs sun in order to thrive, so you want to be looking for them in nice, open areas at the edges of woods, not deep into the woods, which you likely already knew. If you have them in your area, you've probably seen them before. They are everywhere.
You do want to be aware, though, that in some Kudzu populations, they will spray them very heavily in an attempt to control them. A good litmus test for determining if that's going on or not is if the spot that you were in was fully leafed out in the summer or even the late fall, chances are it wasn't sprayed.
The range for Kudzu is kind of like the greater southern part of Central and Eastern North America. If you don't live in its range, I would still encourage you to at least watch the section that I do on starch extraction, because that applies to things far beyond just Kudzu, like acorns, cattails, even things from the grocery store like potato. I just think in general, it's a really good technique for everyone to know.
So, when should we actually be going out to gather the roots of Kudzu for the purpose of getting the starch? And I've hinted at it a couple times already, it's really any time that the plant is dormant. That's generally going to be from the late autumn all the way to the early spring, before it begins to leaf out. And that's for two main reasons.
Number one, when the plant is dormant, it's going to take all of its energy and it's going to be storing it in the roots in the form of the starch, which is what we're after, so we'll get a much higher yield. But there is another very practical reason, which is before the plant gets hit with very cold temperatures to knock it into dormancy, the vines will be very green and alive, they'll be very supple, and they'll be very flexible. And pulling them back to look for the crowns, which is something that you're going to be doing a whole lot, is going to be exceedingly difficult. So we want to wait until all the leaves die back and it really goes completely dormant, so it's all going to be much more brittle and much easier to work with.
That being said, the easiest time to actually scout for Kudzu locations that you're going to find where you're going to gather the roots later on is not when they're dormant, but actually when they're flowering, because the flowers, the blossoms, are extremely showy. They're also just incredibly sweet and fragrant. You can make flour, syrups, and jellies with them as well, and you could spot them from very, very far away. Again, the flowers bloom a little bit later on into the summer.
So, here is what all the windows for Kudzu would look like on my interactive forager's calendar, which has similar timing windows for dozens of other amazing wild food species. But now, let's talk about finding those crowns.
Here is one of the crowns right now. These are kind of like the origin point, the point at which all of the above-ground parts of the vine will spread out, and also where they're going to connect to the root. And in a huge field of Kudzu, there are probably far fewer of these crowns than you might imagine, which is kind of a testament to how crazy aggressively that they spread and grow.
Thankfully, I've learned a few tricks that you can use to find them much easier than just randomly searching around. The first thing you can do is to find a vine that is a little bit thicker and more mature, and just follow it back to the crown that it came from. But how do you know which direction is correct? I mean, these things can be dozens of yards long. The easiest way is to find a point along where there is a branching, and then the angle that the branch and the vine makes is going to point back towards the direction of the crown.
Another thing that you can do is if you just find one where you have a bud, and then the leaf scar below it, it's going to go: bud, leaf scar, direction of the crown. Hopefully that makes sense. Bud, leaf scar, direction of the crown.
While you're following it, you are probably going to have to rip up a ton of the vines to get there, which is totally fine. Remember, this is an invasive point that we're dealing with. You aren't hurting any native ecology by being rough with Kudzu. And this is probably a good time to mention that despite the amazing properties of Kudzu that we're exploring in the video, I'm not recommending that you plant it, especially if you are in the South where it thrives. There is already, you know, all the Kudzu out there that we're ever going to know how to deal with. We should go ahead and tap into that first before we go and start planting it.
And if you have land and you were to ask me, you know, I want to plant more wild food on my property, there is a long, long laundry list of things that I would recommend before we got to Kudzu, things like black walnut, oak trees, hickory trees, American elderberry, American persimmon. There's tons of amazing foods out there that I think would better serve you before Kudzu. Let's go ahead and take care of the Kudzu that we have. After that, we could talk about there being a situation where we should plant more of it.
The second thing is, if you get really low and kind of look out across a big Kudzu field, usually, not always, but usually you're going to find these little kind of bumps that undulate in the field. That's where you're going to find a crown. So if you want to just go through and like check them really quickly, because it's really easy to do, that's a good way to get a bunch of them in rapid succession. The one thing that could throw you off with that is that those bumps could also just be a plant that they're completely smothering, which they often do. But this is overall a pretty good way.
And last, I found that some of the older, thicker vines that are climbing really high up into the tree, that they terminate relatively closer with a crown compared to the ones that you would find out in a field. In addition, that is where you're going to be finding the really, really big roots, which in the right conditions can be worth it. But now we're talking a little bit about digging, so let's get into that some more.
The two main tools that I always have with me are, number one, a pickaxe, and number two, a nice, deep trenching shovel. The pickaxe, I mostly just use for easily pulling back all of those vines to be able to reach and expose the crowns. But there's a couple of things that you should have that'll make your life a little bit easier too. Those would be gloves, because as I've mentioned before, you're going to be dealing with those really irritating vines a bunch. And then the next one is to have a knife. You can see I've used this one a bunch, a knife of some kind to cut and separate the roots from the rest of the vine.
So, how are we actually going to dig these things? The first thing that I'll do is I'll dig down just a little bit to figure out what direction that the main piece of the root of the crown is heading in. And then I'll find that direction and I'll take my shovel and I'll go a few inches back from it and I'll dig straight down to try to get under the root so that I can lift it up. These roots can be very, very long, so that will often involve a couple of digs and lifts.
The reason I do it that way is because you want to do your best to not break the exterior of the root too much. Inevitably, that's going to happen a little bit, it's just something that you want to avoid as best you can, because then you're going to have to deal with removing those parts of the root because dirt is going to get all tangled up in the root fibers, and that is not something that we want in our final product.
You'll find a root that makes a nice, quick, shallow turn and remains close to the surface. I mean, with my bare gloves, I can rip those out of the ground very easily, and they're the most efficient to gather. If you see a root that goes out of the crown and it just keeps on going straight down, and you're digging in some extremely compacted Alabama clay like I am right here, you might just decide to completely bail on that one, because they can be very difficult to remove. Even though they'll probably be really big, especially the ones growing close to those vines going under the tree, it just might not be worth your time. I would spend your time on the ones that are easier. That is where you're going to get the most bang for your buck.
Any root that is above, you know, about an inch, maybe an inch and a quarter in diameter, that is a good one for processing the starch. Too much below that, and it can just get a little bit tedious. Although the small pieces are perfectly viable for making Kudzu root tea, which is a traditional herbal tea in East Asia where the plant comes from.
If I had to pick an area that I would like to grow Kudzu from, it would be on a nice slope where there is good loamy soil that is easy one to dig through, and also easier for the Kudzu to grow really big in. That would be perfect. I'm kind of in an unideal condition right now, but even then, I've been able to get plenty in no time.
I'd recommend digging up, you know, at least a good armful or so of the roots, so you'll be able to process enough starch to have a meaningful amount to work with. The next step is going to be cleaning all these guys. So, meet me in my backyard, and I'll show you exactly how to do that.
Okay, so cleaning, it's pretty easy and straightforward. It just takes a bucket. I've got a hose here for some water, and then a drying tray. And I use this one that I've used for collecting for that. So, what I do is I'm going to take this bucket right here, I'm going to fill it mostly with water, and then as I work through the roots, I'm just going to throw them in and leave them there for a second so that the dirt attached to it can loosen up a little bit. When I'm going through these, what I'm doing is I'm cutting off any parts where it's attached to the crown or maybe a piece of the vine or something like that, as well as if there are any broken bits. I'll remove most of those at this stage as well.
Once they're all in the water, I'll take them out and I'll run my hands over them to get off most of the dirt, and then I'll set them all back into the drying tray. I'll take the hose and I'll give them a good wrench to knock off as much of the dirt as I can. At that point, they're like 90% clean. But I do like to do one more time where I'll fill this back up with water after dumping all the water out, and I'll put them back in there, and I'll just make sure that the water is looking extra clean and clear to ensure that they are ready to go.
From here, we're actually completely ready to begin to prepare them for the starch extraction. But if you have other things going on, you don't have the time for it at that moment, you can also leave them in a nice cool, dry place to slowly lose their moisture, and they should keep fairly well for a couple weeks or so, and you can return to them. I would let them soak again before you begin the starch extraction. So, I'm going to get these cleaned, and then we'll take them inside and we'll begin.
Okay, just going to take these and set them down right there. First thing I want to do is I want to give you a quick overview of what this process is generally going to look like. We're going to be cutting the roots into smaller pieces, and then we're going to be blending them to pulverize them and have them release the starch, and then finally, we're going to be filtering all of that so only the liquid and the extra fine starch passes through. Don't worry, I'm going to walk you through all of this in detail, step by step. And remember, you can do this with way more than just Kudzu.
What I'm going to show you is what I would consider to be the easiest method with the most widely available tools. The other things that we're going to need for this are a cloth towel for filtering, a nice big mixing bowl, and then I like to also use a pitcher. You'll find out why in a bit, a knife for cutting things, and then a good strong blender.
Okay, so if you have a whole root, what I do is I cut off both of the ends of it first, so that we have a nice clean, flush starting point. If you're going to use a really powerful blender like a Vitamix, then you can probably get away with not having to remove the root bark, not having to peel it. But if you don't, you may want to peel it to just go a little bit easier on your blender. Not peeling the roots is definitely easier. But if you do want to go that route, then I would recommend using a vegetable brush to get any of the last bits of dirt completely off of it.
For cutting them, you want to make sure that your knife is extra, super sharp, because we have a bunch of really strong, horizontally bound together fibers that we need to be slicing through. To make things easier on my knife, I'll usually take larger roots and I'll make two lengthwise cuts to put it in two quarters. This will also make smaller pieces overall, which is going to be a lot easier on the blender.
And be aware that as you cut into the roots, or if you decide to peel them, they will oxidize to a darker brown color. That's completely normal, that's expected. For breaking them up, we're going to be doing multiple batches of them in a blender. What I would recommend is to fill the blender up about a third of the way with the roots, and then maybe around halfway with water. You do not want to overfill it. Right now, all these fibers are really tightly held together, they're bound together, but once we blend them, they're going to expand significantly. And I have completely overflowed my blender doing this in the past.
If you add more water, that's definitely going to be easier on the blender, but don't go too crazy overboard with that either, as you'll find out in a second, it may end up with you having way more liquid to deal with than you'd like. When I blend these, I immediately run the blender on the high setting that I'm going to use for mine. It is seven out of 10 in terms of the scale, and I run them for about 30 seconds or so, and that is sufficient to completely break them all up.
Here is the cool part. We're going to take a cloth and we're going to place it over a big mixing bowl. We're going to pour the entire contents of the blender through it. We're going to kind of grab it up and wring out as much liquid as you can, and then you can open it, and you're going to have a ball of the fibers on the inside. We're going to set those aside. Don't throw them out yet.
What I want you to do now is to go through however many batches are required to process all of the roots, always saving the liquid that you wring out and the fibers in separate containers. Now, from that one squeeze that you did with each of them, you probably got out about 60% or so of the starch, but there is way more to extract.
So now, in a new bowl, use the cloth again, and take out as much of the fibers as you're comfortably able to handle, and put it back, and then wrap it up again. Now, what you're going to do is you're going to get more water and you're going to pour that into the bowl that has the wrapped up fibers in it, and you'll see that it will kind of soak up a bunch of the water. Now take that and give it a squeeze again. What you're probably going to see is that as the liquid comes out, it will still be really, really cloudy, and that means that you're still getting out a fair bit of the starch.
I found in my experimentation that doing three additional sets of soaking and squeezing was able to get out most of the remaining starch. Anywhere beyond that point, and the returns start to diminish. Remember, as we're going through this, we are keeping all the liquid that we're squeezing out every time. You're probably going to find that you're going to need multiple containers to do this, and that's why you want to be at least somewhat judicious about the amount of water that you're using, because you don't want to use so much that you literally run out of containers to keep them in.
So, once you've gone through all that fiber and you've wrung it out all additional times, you have all your liquid in your containers. The next step is to wait. All of that starch is right now suspended in the water, and it's going to slowly settle down to the bottom, where eventually it will form into a very compacted layer. You'll notice that at this point, the extracted liquid that we have is very dark, which is expected, but we want to go through a couple of changes of water with our starch to get it nice and clarified.
So, once your starch does settle all the way to the bottom, and the top part isn't cloudy anymore, pour the top water off. As you pour, if you have enough starch, you'll see that it will stick to the bottom even as you pour past it. Once you've done that, add water back into the pitcher, and then use a spoon to break up the starch layer at the bottom and redistribute it all throughout the water. Now, we're just going to repeat this a couple more times. For me, I found again that three changes of water was usually all that it took.
But at the very end of it, just know that the water is never going to be perfectly clear when you're doing this. It's always going to be a little bit brown, and that is fine. However, in the starch layer at the bottom, if you do see a bunch of tiny dark particles in there after everything is settled, then you can use a really extra fine filter like a nut milk bag to really get your starch nice and clean.
I do want you to know, though, this isn't like we're detoxifying it or anything like that, which you may be familiar with if you watched some of my videos on making acorn flour, where what we're doing with the water is we're pulling out astringent tannin compounds. Here, technically, we don't have to do all this extra fine cleaning. In fact, there's a lot of Chinese preparations with Kudzu where they just cook with the entire root in a pot. But for me, having that extra pure final product is just something that I like to shoot for, and it will result in a more neutral flavor at the end, which is what I want.
After you're done all of your pores, you are nearly at the finish line. Now, instead of filling the pitcher back up with water, use a spoon or spatula to scoop out that block of starch at the bottom. We need to get the starch nice and dry in order to make it shelf-stable. I use a dehydrator for this, where I will spread out the liquidy starch over a silicone pad. But you can also just leave it in a dry area, spread out, that has good airflow. You don't need a whole lot of heat for this. Even when I'm using my dehydrator, I'm using the very lowest setting.
After I take it out, here is what it looks like right after drying. You can see that there are still a fair bit of dark brown spots, even after I filtered it all through my extra fine nut milk bag. So I have one final trick for you to deal with this. Shout out to Sam for giving me this amazing tip.
And the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to use a blender to break up all the very compacted starch. This happens very quickly. All the starch is already extremely tiny, we're just removing them from being stuck together, so it's going to increase in its volume significantly. Then we're going to use this thing right here, a mesh jelly bag. We're going to place it partly into an open mason jar. By the way, all the equipment that you need for this, you can find in a link in the description.
Okay, spoon the blended starch powder in, and then seal the top. Now, you're just going to take that and you're going to shake the jar vigorously. All those really tiny starch particles are going to go right on through, but any of the impurities, which are not as small and they don't break up as easily in the blender, they're going to be caught above it. You're going to have to do this in a couple of rounds, but it goes fairly quickly. And when you're done, you're going to get about as perfect of wild-gathered, home-processed Kudzu starch as you can get.
And as you can see here, you can get a pretty solid amount of this stuff. I've already used a fair bit for my experimentation, so I don't have as much anymore. But if I were to have just ordered all this online, I probably would have paid, you know, about $70 bucks or so for it. And I know what you're thinking, okay, well, you know, that's a lot of work for just, you know, $70 worth of final product. But that isn't really the point. Is that we're not talking about the value of the food right now, where food is extremely abundant and easy to come by. We're talking about the value of wild food and the knowledge of knowing how to process it in a situation where that might not be the case. To me, it's more about the confidence of knowing that you know what these foods are, and that you're able to find them, gather them, and process them, and that you've actually walked through all that by yourself. So, anyway, just a few thoughts there.
From the experimentation that I've done, if you were to weigh the soaked roots, you would get around 10% of a final yield of starch of the starting weight that you had. So for this batch that I did, I started with about 5 pounds of the soaked roots, and I got 8 ounces of the starch out, which is pretty good. And you know, this commercial starch right here, you buy it online, it has to be shipped to you, almost certainly it's bleached. I don't know when it was harvested, I don't know who harvested it, I don't know what the growing conditions were for it. But for mine, you know, I was there for every step of the way. That's just something you can't really pay for.
However, because mine isn't bleached, you'll notice that when I cook with it, it's not going to give you the kind of pure white color that you'd be used to with corn starch or even this commercial one right here. But that is mostly just an aesthetic thing.
So, on to cooking. Let's talk about why we've gone through all this trouble, beyond the fact that we now know how to get this significant source of calories from the wild. Why, in general, is Kudzu starch so sought after? I'll give you a few reasons, and I'll show you how they work with some of the recipes that I've been experimenting with.
The first one is flavor. So, compared to other starches, Kudzu gives a very nice and neutral flavor. It doesn't impair or impart these weird flavors for the dishes that you're making with it, whether that is for desserts like this elderberry jello I made right here, and that I made way too much of, or if you're using it in soups, where it is a very excellent thickener.
That would be the second thing. Kudzu starch is an extremely good thickener. You start off with the starch, and then you mix it into the water, and then you add heat, and you witness a magical transformation as the starch and the water kind of form this gel complex together. The kind of gel that you get with Kudzu is also quite desirable. It makes something that's very soft and smooth, rather than something that is very rubbery, which you can get from other starches.
Then we have translucency, which, as I talked about before, isn't something you're going to quite get with the wild-gathered home-processed method. You can see here in my attempts at making Kudzu noodles versus the other channels that I learned from that use commercial starch, mine have a degree of brown in them versus the, I'll admit, the very beautiful, perfectly translucent ones that you could get from the commercial starch. But that's okay for me, because the fourth one really shines through no matter how you got it, and that is it works amazing for frying.
Ever since I got my wok and I learned how to use it from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, I have been really into deep frying and I've had a lot of fun experimenting with making my favorite kind of vegetable tempura with a coating that I made from Kudzu starch. When it comes to tempura, I don't know if I would even consider myself an amateur at it, but the resulting tempura that I made did indeed have a very nice crispy texture that remained crispy for a long time, and a really, really nice light, neutral flavor.
And all of this, it's just scratching the surface of the things that you can do with Kudzu. I highly recommend that you pick up the book "The Book of Kudzu," which showcases a myriad of different ways that you can use it. But for now, the final part, I want to go back outside and I want to investigate the dangerous look-alike that I mentioned at the very beginning.
We're kind of now in my area getting into the very tail end of the winter foraging season, and we are starting up into the very early spring foraging season. So I'm very excited to be working on videos for all of you on like, really incredible, nutritious wild greens, ones that people have been completely ignoring for way too long, that I just want to share with the world. So that's coming up. But let's get back to Kudzu and this look-alike.
Before you go and run out to any Kudzu patch and start digging, you need to be aware of this look-alike. It's funny, because before I actually started working on this video, I was thinking that it was theoretically possible that you could encounter this look-alike because they grow in similar habitats, it could kind of get tangled up and kind of blend in with the Kudzu. But then it actually happened to me. The look-alike is poison ivy.
Of course, if you've watched some of my incredibly smart experiments that I've done with poison ivy danger in dormancy in the winter, you'll know that just brushing against the vine when it's dormant, in most cases for most people, is not a big deal at all. You likely won't get any reaction whatsoever, even if you're allergic to it like I am, like 95% of other people are. However, the fact that we're digging into the ground means that we have the potential to break the poison ivy vines or roots, which is very dangerous. Urushiol oil, which is what causes the skin reaction, is most concentrated in the inner parts of poison ivy, and even just getting into it a little bit, that one time I did get a reaction on my hands from it.
So, really quick, here are the main characteristics that I want you to look out for for poison ivy in winter to distinguish it from Kudzu and to just recognize it in general. Particularly is important with vines that are running along the ground. With poison ivy, they have fuzzy, yellow, pointed buds on them, and they have a growth orientation where the stems off the vine point and grow very upright, versus the more random, tangled growth of Kudzu. And Kudzu lacks those very distinct colored buds.
Also, though poison ivy will sometimes have aerial rootlets on it, those will be much thicker, much larger, and a lot more obvious than the really extra fine hairs that are growing on Kudzu. For the climbing vines, they're also very different. Kudzu usually hangs off of the tree, whereas poison ivy will hug very tightly against the trunk. And I really think that being able to recognize poison ivy in the winter is very important.
So, to build your confidence even more, I want to show you a few additional details and how to distinguish poison ivy from another common sneaky look-alike to it in this video right here. I hope to see you there.