Easy to grow and store, high-yielding, supernutritious and crunchy like an apple, yacon root (pronounced ya-kon) is one of the many “new” vegetables coming to us from South America. In reality, this fruitlike vegetable has been cultivated throughout the Andes for more than a millennium. South Americans eat it as a fruit; they also use the huge leaves to wrap foods during cooking, in the same way cabbage leaves are used in Germany, grape leaves in the Mideast and banana leaves in the tropics. Only recently – thanks to some adventurous green thumbs – have North Americans begun to see yacon…
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Yacon is commonly enjoyed raw. It’s really easy to prepare yacon, just peel off the brown skin and shred it or chop it into dishes, such as salads and slaws. Here’s a citrus salad found on Sharon Palmer’s plant-powered dietician blog. The yacon gives this salad a slightly sweet, juicy crunch.
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Found on the Attainable Sustainable food blog, this “yacon sauce” recipe is a twist on apple sauce. It’s not exactly like applesauce, but it’s “pretty darned good”! Cooked yacon takes on the flavor of what you add to it; it’s not a very distinct flavor on its own. Consider this a base recipe and play with it a bit. I could see it working well with dried apricots, too, or maybe even mixed with fresh berries.