Edible Dahlias
Dahlia bulbs have a surprising variety of flavors, and their big, beautiful blooms brighten gardens.
August/September 2009
By William Woys Weaver
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Dahlia blooms are showy, but it’s their edible tubers that make them an excellent addition to kitchen gardens.
ROB CARDILLO
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Among the most beautiful of flowers, dahlias are also edible! Most people don’t realize that dahlias are a close New World relative of both sunflowers and Jerusalem artichokes. In addition to the petals, you also can eat the tubers (see recipe below). Although not all dahlia bulbs are tasty (some are quite bland), they have a range of flavors and textures that is hard to quantify: There are those with crunchy textures akin to water chestnuts or yacon (read Yummy Yacon for more information), and those with flavors ranging from spicy apple to celery root or even carrot. A lot depends on the variety and the soil in which the variety grew. Heirlooms such as ‘Yellow Gem,’ introduced in 1914, are much more flavorful than the modern hybrids bred for huge, fluffy flower heads.
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Dahlias have been lurking on the sidelines of my kitchen garden for a long time. I don’t recall exactly when I started to grow them, but I had always thought of dahlias as showy vegetable companions rather than ornamentals because my grandfather had intermingled them among his own vegetables many years ago. Memories of that remarkably beautiful mixture of flowers and blue-ribbon vegetables have stayed with me ever since. Based on those child hood recollections, I just assumed that interplanting with dahlias was a normal thing to do. Plus, honeybees adore dahlias, so if you want to attract those important pollinators to your garden, you really can’t find a splashier choice.
The culinary properties of dahlias were well-known to the indigenous peoples of mountainous southern Mexico, where the flower originated. But the tubers were small and knotty by today’s standards, and the flowers weren’t much to look at. In some cases, such as that of the tree dahlia (Dahlia imperialis), these plants could reach up to 20 feet in height. That wild, treelike species was called acocotli by the Aztecs, meaning “water cane.” They valued the plant especially as a source of water for traveling hunters. Even to this day, dahlias will store large reserves of water in their stems — one reason they succumb so quickly to hard frosts.
Seeds for dahlias were sent to Spain in 1789 for the three basic species then known: D. atropurpurea, D. pinnata and the aforementioned D. imperialis. The early breeders of dahlias in Europe were primarily interested in developing the plant as a food source (especially the tubers), but those experiments never met with much success. When double forms of the flower began to emerge in the early 1800s, interest shifted entirely to the flower and breeding what is known today as the pompon (ball- or globe-shaped) dahlia.
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