Arrowroot

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Arrowroot is an ancient South American starchy root crop.  Going back many millennia, native peoples pounded the rhizomes to extract starch for their staple foods.  In modern times the starch is a component of baby food, gluten free flours and other specialty items due to its very small and digestible starch granules.  This plant is exceedingly well adapted to Florida, surviving both wet soils as well as very dry soils, and a fair amount of shade.  The plant grows for 9 months or so and goes dormant for the winter months, similar to turmeric.  It is a ginger-like herbaceous plant.  Edible rhizomes are harvested in the late Fall when the plant is dormant.  When very young, the rhizomes can be peeled and eaten as a cooked starchy vegetable.  As they enlarge, a coarse fiber develops throughout the rhizome.  The starch is extracted from the rhizomes in water and allowed to settle and then used.  A powerful blender can easily separate the starch, then the fiber can be separated with a mesh sieve.  This starch can be become the base of soups or dried for later use.  This vegetable has a distinctive and pleasant sweet corn flavor and a soup made from the starch is not unlike a thick corn chowder.  The work here is all in the kitchen because the growth of the plant is basically effortless!  Plants are propagated by planting whole rhizomes.

Maranta arundinacea  – 5 rhizomes