In the kitchens of the Far East, bamboo shoots are a very popular ingredient.
In China, bamboo shoots are cooked with chicken, beef, or pork but are often added as a side dish to stir-fried meat dishes.
Crunchy bamboo shoots are a delicious ingredient in soups, stews, and salads. Bamboo shoots are also used as part of vegetable side dishes.
Bamboo shoots are very tasty, grilled, and topped with sauces.
The taste of bamboo shoots is similar to the taste of corn.
In Chinese cuisine, other parts of bamboo are used in addition to shoots.
For example, fermenting bamboo leaves lets them get sweet bamboo wine or green aperitif. Some special dishes are also prepared from the leaves by wrapping the filling in the leaf and thermally processing it.
In Indonesia, thin slices of bamboo shoots are cooked in coconut milk and used as a side dish to main dishes.
In Japan, bamboo shoots are marinated and used as a side dish with fish.
There are seventeen hundred and eighteen known species of bamboo around the world. But, unfortunately, of that number, only one hundred and one species have edible shoots.
Bamboo shoots may contain toxic cyanogenic glycosides. These toxic substances are degradable in boiling water, so heat treatment can easily eliminate them.
Industrially processed canned bamboo shoots are ready for immediate consumption because they have already been thermally processed.
By consuming bamboo shoots, you will bring into the body very useful elements such as phosphorus, riboflavin, selenium, magnesium, potassium, calcium, copper, manganese, sodium, beta-carotene, iron, zinc, thiamin, amino acids, niacin and vitamins from group B, such as and vitamins A and E.
The medicinal properties of bamboo shoots improve heart function, normalize the nervous system, prevent the development of arteriosclerosis, cleanse the liver, and prevent insomnia, depression, and nervousness.
Although it looks more like a tree because it can grow up to thirty meters in height, bamboo is a type of grass.
This plant is one of the fastest-growing plants on the planet. For example, it can grow to one meter in height in twenty-four hours.
Bamboo is native to Japan and China, but today this plant is spread across all continents except the Arctic.
Bamboo is a successful air cleaner, releasing thirty percent more oxygen than any other tree.
In some Asian cultures, bamboo has a special place. According to the mythologies of some of these cultures, the human race originated from bamboo.
The best substitutes for bamboo shoots
The characteristic of bamboo shoots is that they are crunchy and discreetly sweet.
Baby corn and jicama have the most similar taste to bamboo shoots.
Water chestnuts will also be an excellent choice due to their crunchiness.
Good alternatives for bamboo shoots include banana blossoms, Chinese artichokes, Indian cucumber roots, green papaya, hearts of palm, Jerusalem artichokes, bean sprouts, asparagus, daikon, and carrots.
Baby corn
Unlike mature corn, baby corn is completely edible. Baby corn is small, up to two centimeters in diameter and ten centimeters in length.
Edible cobs are covered with grains that have not yet developed.
Baby corn is sweet and crunchy, making it an ideal alternative to bamboo shoots.
Baby corn can be found raw or canned in stores. It is sold fresh in spring and summer when it is in season.
Baby corn has the same flavor profile regardless of the type of corn because these immature cobs have not yet developed high levels of starch or sugar, so they always maintain the same neutral taste.
More recently, producers have developed some hybrid varieties with increased yields that are exclusively baby corn.
Baby corn is a rich source of vegetable fiber and has a favorable effect on the work of the digestive tract.
Baby corn is good because of its crunchiness in salads and topped with sauces.
It can serve as an appetizer. In soups, curries, or stews, baby corn is an excellent ingredient, and it can also be prepared with rice or pasta.
Modern corn varieties are descended from wild species grown in Mexico for over seven thousand years.
Indigenous Mesoamericans cultivated these wild types of corn in prehistoric times, and the rest of the world learned about corn only in the 15th century.
Today, corn is one of the most cultivated crops in the world.
Jicama
Jicama, in the Native American language, Nahuatl, means “something tasty.” Jicama is the tuberous root of the Mexican creeper.
These tubers are round and similar in structure and crunch to radish.
The crunchiness of jicama is not lost even after heat treatment, but you should be careful and prepare it at lower temperatures or bake it only until it is soft.
Add jicama to the dishes that take longer to cook, only towards the end. Jicama differs from root vegetables because it is refreshingly juicy, not dry and starchy.
Jicama is also called yam bean, Mexican turnip, and Mexican potato.
The taste is very similar to bamboo shoots and somewhat reminiscent of the taste of an apple.
The jicama peel is inedible, so it should be peeled before use.
Jicama is edible raw, cut into sticks. It can be served in salads or simply topped with just a little lemon juice and chili powder.
Jicama has the ability to absorb the aromas of other ingredients, so it is great for marinating with citrus and spices before using it in a dish.
Jicama is a great substitute for bamboo shoots in any dish.
The origin of jicama is in Mexico and South America, but it is also grown in the Philippines.
Water chestnuts
Water chestnuts are the tuberous root of an aquatic plant that grows naturally along the muddy shores of lakes, ponds, rivers, and streams and is cultivated in fields that are flooded for that purpose.
The tuber of Water chestnuts is round and has a crisp white flesh.
The dark bark has a chestnut color, and because of it, the tuber resembles a bulb.
Water chestnuts are edible, raw, and cooked, so they are used in Asian cuisine, from salads, appetizers, soups, and stews to side dishes and main courses.
Cooked water chestnuts taste similar to corn.
If you are preparing raw water chestnuts, then you must peel them.
If you peel them before cooking, you may remove part of the meat from the skin, so it is much better to peel them after cooking.
The easiest way to peel water chestnuts is to cut an x in the skin before cooking.
Jerusalem artichokes
Jerusalem artichokes have white flesh that is nutty, crunchy, sweet, and raw they taste like chestnuts. After heat treatment, they resemble tubers, especially potatoes.
Jerusalem artichokes are not called that because they are originally from Jerusalem but because of linguistic entanglement and confusion.
This plant belongs to sunflowers, and sunflower is called girasole in Italian.
How this name came from Girasole to Jerusalem is anyone’s guess, but this strangely confusing name was created after a linguistic entanglement.
Jerusalem artichokes are also called sunchokes and are native to North America.
If Jerusalem got mixed up in the name of this plant by mistake, how do you explain why the plant is called an artichoke if it is not?
Sunchoka is a rhizome, the part of the plant that stores nutrients underground.
If we ignore the confusion about the name of this plant, it should be said that it is an extremely tasty, crunchy, and sweet snack, an excellent alternative to bamboo shoots.
You can prepare Jerusalem artichokes in a variety of ways.
They can be thinly sliced and then fried to make a crispy appetizer or boiled and mashed like a potato, except you get a lighter version without the heavy starch.
Jerusalem artichokes can be used in all dishes as a substitute for bamboo shoots.
Chinese artichoke
Chinese artichokes are also known as choro gi, crosne, or betony.
They originate from China and Japan, and only in the 1880s did they begin to be cultivated in Europe, in the city of Crosne in France.
Chinese artichokes are white knobby tubers.
They taste very similar to water chestnuts.
Just as sunchokes can be prepared in many ways, the same goes for Chinese artichokes: they can be boiled, fried, pickled, dried, or eaten raw.
Banana flower
Banana flowers are sometimes called banana hearts. All parts of the banana flower are edible and are used in salads, soups, and curries.
Fresh bananas can be found at market stalls near banana plantations and frozen or canned in supermarkets.
Banana flowers turn brown or completely darken if left in the air for a while, just like what happens with banana fruits.
The outer skins, which are darker in color, are tough and should be removed, and under them, there are more delicate yellow-green skins that are often used to prepare food with thermal processing.
They cook quickly and lose a lot of volume during heat treatment. Steamed banana flowers can be peeled like artichokes and served topped with sauces.
The central, youngest parts of the banana flower can be used raw in salads.
The taste of banana flowers is exotic and tropical but not more delicate than the taste of bananas. The aromas are more reminiscent of bamboo shoots than ripe banana fruit.
Indian cucumber-root
Indian cucumber-root is a plant from the Lily family that grows in moist forests in eastern North America and gets its name because its rhizome smells like a cucumber.
The Indian cucumber-root rhizome is white and has a brittle texture.
Indian cucumber root is edible raw, so it’s great for salads, and it can also be prepared in the same way as potatoes, for example.
Green papaya
Papaya is native to southern Mexico, Central America, and southern Florida.
However, today it is grown worldwide in the tropical zone.
There are two types of papaya: red papaya, which has sweet red or orange flesh, and yellow papaya.
When picked unripe, either of these two types is known as green papaya.
Green papaya is used as a vegetable because it has a neutral taste and a crunchy texture.
Green papaya contains a high percentage of vitamins C, E, and A, folate, and antioxidants.
Due to the high concentration of vitamin E, amino acids, and vitamin C, green papaya benefits the skin.
Eating green papaya because it is rich in fiber helps digestion and increases the feeling of satiety.
Hearts of palm
The palm tree’s inner core used as a vegetable is called the heart of palm.
For this process of obtaining the heart of palm, mainly special types of palm wood are suitable, including coconut palm, jicama, and palmetto.
In palm trees with only one trunk, this procedure leads to the drying of the entire palm, but in multi-stemmed palms, moderate extraction of the core from individual branches will not destroy the entire palm.
The extracted kernel of the palm tree is surrounded by a sheath that must be removed before use.
The inner part of the core has a mild taste, is firm, and has a crunchy structure.
Hearts of palm are most often used in salads, and as a substitute for bamboo shoots, they are excellent in soups, stews, and vegetable dishes, grilled or thermally processed with meat or sauces.
Recently, technology has been developed to produce pasta made from hearts of palm, which is very suitable for people allergic to gluten.
One hundred grams of hearts of palm contains twenty-eight calories, a little more than four and a half grams of carbohydrates, and about half a gram of fat. In addition, the kernel of the palm tree contains zinc, magnesium, potassium, and amino acids.
Canned hearts of palm must be washed before use because they are packed in salt water, which is rich in sodium.
Mung bean sprouts
Mung bean sprouts are vegetables grown by sprouting mung beans.
Bean sprouts can also be obtained by sprouting other types of beans, but mung bean sprouts are the most popular and are most often used in the preparation of many dishes.
Due to the high percentage of water, even over ninety percent, and the mild taste, mung bean sprouts are never prepared separately.
However, it is always part of some dishes to balance the flavors a little. They are also excellent in hot spicy salads.
In traditional Asian cuisine, mung bean sprouts have been used for centuries to prepare many popular broths, soups, and meat dishes.
Asparagus
Asparagus is a perennial flowering plant. The shoots of this plant can be baked, boiled, or fried.
Thicker shoots are better for grilling, frying, or baking, and thinner ones should be prepared carefully if cooked to preserve the soft meaty structure.
However, they are edible raw, especially when young, thin, or lightly scalded and sprinkled with lemon juice.
They are excellent steamed with hollandaise sauce or butter and blanched and chilled with herbs or vinaigrette.
This plant originates from the eastern Mediterranean and is believed to have been cultivated in ancient Egypt.
Daikon
Daikon is the Japanese name for long white radish. Raw daikon is easy to prepare as a side dish for fried dishes.
Grate it and sprinkle it with a little lemon juice or soy sauce. This kind of accompaniment to heavy fried dishes allows easier digestion of fats.
In addition to being a side dish, daikon is used in many dishes as an addition to soups, in salads with other vegetables, and as an addition to meat or fish.
In Japan, daikon is cooked by adding a little rice to keep its white color.
Daikon is also used dried, and it can also be pickled.
Carrots
Carrots are root vegetables that include about sixty species. Carrots are orange, but through artificial breeding and crossing, they are obtained in many other colors, from purple to yellow.
Carrots are edible raw, and their culinary uses range from salads to soups.
Carrots are native to Europe and Southwest Asia.
More topics to discover:
