Camas Bulbs Food

They are soft with a texture like a carmelized onion or roasted garlic.

Camas bulbs food. Camassia esculenta is a beautiful spring blooming native north american plant that will grow in usda plant hardiness zones 3 8. It and its eastern cousin the wild hyacinth have been eaten by native american groups from british columbia to georgia for millennia. A carbohydrate in camas called inulin is difficult to digest but after cooking for up to two days in a carefully tended pit oven the inulin converts to fructose which is more easily digested and tastes sweet. Indian women in oregon s umpqua valley robbed camas bulbs from gopher caches piper 1916.

Herbivorous insects also eat camas leaves. Camas bulbs were cooked to improve taste and food value. Baked camas can be eaten right away. A pit cooked camas bulb looks and tastes something like baked sweet potato but sweeter and with more crystalline fibers due to the presence of inulin in the bulbs.

The flavor is somewhere between potato and roasted chestnut. Pan fried camas once cooked the bulbs are ready to eat. Bulbs can also be boiled and mashed into a thin paste or roasted. Camas attracts a wide variety of pollinators including european honeybees bumble bees mason bees hover flies beetles and lady beetles bartow 2015.

The camassia lily bulb camassia quamash syn. The taste is often compared to a baked pear fig or sweet potato and can even used to sweeten other foods. Steaming the bulbs is the most common method usually for over 24 hours and up to 70. Darcy williamson a mccall based natural foods expert said children of the nez perce and bannock shoshone tribes loved it when the camas was baked because the natural sugars would ooze out of the earthen ovens in the form of a sticky caramel.

Pendergrass et al 2008. The children loved using small twigs to make an ancient form of candy much like a modern day sucker. Ingredients 1 2 pound blue camas bulbs about a dozen 1 tablespoon olive oil 1 tablespoon verjus lemon juice or white wine vinegar smoked salt. This pretty flowering bulb is a member of the asparagus family and was an important food staple for both native americans and early explorers to our country.

Camas bulbs should be cooked and immediately consumed or dried for winter use or trade. The sweet bulbs of the common camas are considered by many to be a northwest native food delicacy. And it is not only because the knowledge of them has been lost. What you are looking at above is a bowl of the bulbs from camassia quamash or blue camas.

The cooked camas have a sweet taste and a flavor described as similar to a baked pear prune or sweet.