At our Thanksgiving gathering this year, I made a new dish that no one has ever tasted - Dahlia Kimchi!
Yes, I'm talking about eating dahlias, more precisely, the TUBERS of these beautiful flowers.
How did I get the idea of eating dahlia tubers in my head? Well, from history, actually.
Dahlias originated in Mexico and its cultivation may have dated back to pre-Aztec times. The oldest written records about dahlias came from the 16th century. According to Francisco Hernandez, King Phillip II's personal physician who spent five years studying the natural history of the New World, dahlias were used for its medicinal qualities:
"[The dahlia tuber] when consumed in a weight of one ounce, alleviates stomach pain, dissipates blowing, draws forth urine, invokes perspiration, drives out coldness, strengthens the stomach weak because of the cold, turns aside cholic, opens what has been blocked, and when moved to the swellings, disperses them." The Dahlia: An Early History
The Slow Food Foundation also noted dahlia's medicinal uses, including the tubers' property of reducing glucose levels by producing inulin (which is great for diabetics!). Dahlias are used in a variety of local dishes:
"Traditional dishes include tuber soup, fried tubers, dahlia tuber atole, fish with dahlia tubers and petals, salad with dahlia petals and dahlia petal palanquetas."
So why aren't we eating and using the dahlias as medicine as they were used traditionally? Well, around the 18th century, dahlias came to Europe through seeds that were mailed to different botanical gardens. European horticulturalists cultivated these seeds and bred "double-flowered" varieties. They made colored portraits and illustrations of the flowers, which greatly captured the public's interest. The rest, as they say, is history.
I was fascinated with dahlia's back story and after a very, very abundant harvest of dahlia tubers, I had plenty extra to taste. Each tuber we planted multiplied into large clumps of 10-15 more tubers. We had more than 40 of these clumps.
We ate a raw tuber and the flavor reminded me of jicama with a spicy, radish note and the texture is like water chestnuts. Young tubers have a nice, succulent crunch. My first thought was to grate it and make a spring roll, but 
We have both been enjoying radish kimchi as a condiment to almost every meal and so this sounded like a great way to enjoy dahlia tubers. I substituted radish for dahlia tubers in my usual kimchi recipe and the result was delicious! Our friends loved this kimchi too.
How to make Dahlia Kimchi:
Peel and finely slice 4 lbs of dahlia tubers into sticks.
Add 1 teaspoon of finely minced ginger, 2 tablespoons salt, 1 tablespoon sugar. Mix well and set aside for at least 30 minutes.
Drain and reserve the juice.
Add 2 tablespoons of finely minced garlic, 4 stalks of green onions, 1/2 c Korean pepper flakes, 3 tablespoons of gochujang (Korean pepper paste), and 1/3 cup of the reserved juice. *You can reduce the amount of pepper flakes if you prefer it to be milder.
Mix it all together and you're done! Taste and adjust as needed. Keep kimchi refrigerated and it will last for several months. The flavors develop the longer it sits, but you can also eat it right away.
We love that dahlias produce abundantly and they provide nutrition, medicine, and beauty! Dahlias meet many of our criteria for a good permaculture plant so we will soon offer tubers of our most prolific dahlias (the flower pictured above) in our Seeds of Abundance catalog!
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