Tranquil Cottage

Tracing the Many Paths of Vision

🌼🌾🍂cottage.core

I have a good friend with a severe caffeine sensitivity.

The problem is that this guy was a 3-4 cups of coffee a day drinker until his heart said “NO MORE!!” and he had to quit cold turkey. Grouchiest 3 weeks of his life.

Anyhoo, I had researched a few years back about doing dandelion coffee and how some people love it, blah blah blah and tried it with disastrous results.

But now that my buddy has this issue, I decided to take another swing at it.

This time, it’s all chicory.

You might have seen it growing wild, depending on your neck of the woods. Where I live on the east coast, it’s all over the place with bright blue flowers.

This is what the leaves look like.

This big bastard is prickly lettuce. It’swhat I had used before (with dandelion) the leave look very similar, but it will mess you up severely (digestively).

As you can see, the leaf is quite different (but close enough to dandelion that it tricked me.)

SO, if you forage, know  the rules:

1) Know what you’re getting 

2) Stay 20 feet off the roads

But back to the matter at hand.

When you pull chicory, you need the roots. I used a shovel to loosen the dirt around it and you don’t end up like this.

(sorry for the blurry) If you just tug on it, all you’ll get s 1-2 inches. The shovel doubled that and I’m sure if I was more careful I could get a full piece.

Alas, it was 95+ F and too hot to be picky.

Wash it, chop it.

Drop it in the oven 200F for 2 hours. Keep an eye on it, it needs to be as dry as possible to work right.

After it’s completely dry, bump it up to 325F for 90 minutes.

I ran mine through a food processor, but if you have a grinder it should work about the same.

I used a pour-over pot because it cleans the easiest in case this batch did me like the last one.

Drip drip drip! Look like coffee to me!

Here’s a finished cup. Looks like coffee, and the taste has a lot of similarities, but it’s definitely not the bean.

Anyway, that’s what I did! 

This is what the chicory flower looks like (I know, stock image, but there weren’t any in bloom near my house)

This is what they look like being closer to full size

All washed up! As you can see, they’re still going to be slightly brown even after you clean them up. Some of them are split because that was the easiest way to get to the dirt.

This is what a good sized one looks like.

I used a veggie peeler to shred them up versus straight chopping this go around. When they get more than ½ inch wide, it’s hard to get a knife through them.

Chicorium intybus, Asteraceae

Common chicory is a well known plant with a long, recorded tradition: the earliest written mention of its medicinal uses was found in what is known as the Ebers papyrus, an Egyptian herbalism treaty dating back to c.1550 BC. This perennial species, native to Europe and widely naturalised elsewhere, is edible and appreciated for the bitter taste of its leave, which should be picked before the flowering season. I tried the wild form when growing up in Italy, where it is part of the culinary tradition, and found it somewhat similar to dandelion leaves (Taraxacum officinale, member of the same family) which I used to gather often with my grandparents. My granny used to mention chicory root coffee too, but I never got to try that. Cultivated varieties developed from the XVII century, such as radicchio, endive and catalogna, are probably more familiar as you might be able to find them in stores, they are all quite common in Italy.