Dandelion coffee
We dug up some dandelion roots yesterday to make coffee. A brilliant diuretic, dandelion root also stimluates the liver and cleanses the system.
So we washed the roots, diced them and roasted them in a warm oven.
Then tipped them into the coffee grinder and ground 'em up:
The thing is, I don't think we roasted them for long enough, because they got a bit ground up in the grinder and we ended up taking them all out and roasting them some more on a lower heat. Finally, we got grounds, then coffee, which I'm drinking now with rice milk.
It's good stuff, easily as tasty as real coffee, but we needed more roots to make a decent amount. This site recommends a 5-gallon bucket of roots! That's some serious dandelion-growing.
So we washed the roots, diced them and roasted them in a warm oven.
Then tipped them into the coffee grinder and ground 'em up:
The thing is, I don't think we roasted them for long enough, because they got a bit ground up in the grinder and we ended up taking them all out and roasting them some more on a lower heat. Finally, we got grounds, then coffee, which I'm drinking now with rice milk.
It's good stuff, easily as tasty as real coffee, but we needed more roots to make a decent amount. This site recommends a 5-gallon bucket of roots! That's some serious dandelion-growing.
posted by Gill at
10:47 AM
2 Comments:
Thanks so much for posting this! I was reading about dandelion coffee the other day and it sounded quite straightforward to make, but then I thought: Hmmm but I bet it tastes disgusting, and talked myself out of even trying (typically!). So now you've given me a bit of a boost.
Recently I've been doing some garden plans ... I wanted to see if it was feasible to grow enough trees to coppice to supply our own woodburner (without having a big patch like a 'plantation'. This led me onto Forest Gardening (http://www.risc.org.uk/garden/roberthart.html) and lots of sites and info about woodlands and coppicing.
Yesterday I worked out a really great plan for growing just over 100 coppicing trees (as well as 'canopy' trees and all the other things in between to make a Forest Garden). I was really pleased with the result and thought it would tie our garden (at present a collection of huge empty rectangles) together really well. 100 trees would give us, if we're very lucky, 1m cubed of wood a year. Great! I thought. Then Mart reminded me that we bought 3m last year, (for €100) and got through most of it in the year.
ARGH! So yesterday I redid the plan to include over 200 trees, with plenty of space for more depending on how we decide to use the present 'orchard'. But then this morning, I woke up thinking: is it worth spending all that money on trees over the next 3 years, all that work planting, waiting 6 to 8 years, then all that work coppicing 40 trees a year, all for €100 worth of firewood a year?!
The jury is still out, on this one! Although I think we still might give it a try, just because it'd be so beautiful. xx
Hi Lucy, I love the idea of forest gardening! Out of all the methods I've read about, that one makes the most sense to me because it's the closest thing to what nature does. (Although I'm increasingly favouring what nature does without intervention - especially impressed by the action of 'weeds' on soil composition, and the fact that the exact right plant to supply the soil's elemental needs just happens to grow in the exact right place.)
Re: your firewood, I suspect you won't get anything like as much firewood for €100 in 6-8 years as you got this year because of the way 'things' are going in that respect. Dunno if that view helps your decision at all.
Your plans sound great :-)
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