After some suggestions from Toddy in a previous thread, I have been doing some experimentation with plantain seeds this afternoon.
A few weeks ago I found what must have been thousands of broad leaved plantains and remembered that the seeds were supposed to be edible. This is the common plant that has seed heads that look like rat tails (hence once of its common names rats-tail plantain).
There are usually a number of seed head per plant, typically 6"-12"long.
The leaves have pretty much died off by now (late October) but the plant is still easily recognisable.
I stripped the seeds off by hand, in situ, but you may want to cut off the seed heads and take them home to dry out a bit before stripping the seeds. I got a blister after collecting this lot!
One of the suggested methods of separating the seeds from the chaff it to parch the seeds (scorch them over an open flame so that the seed casings burn up), but I didn't have the means to do this so I tried gravity separation: putting batches of the gathered heads into a bowl of water - the seeds sink, while the chaff floats. This was fairly laborious and there were still quite a number of seeds mixed in with the chaff.
I ended up with a reasonable number of seeds, and the chaff.
You can see here that some of the seed casings still contain seeds.
Once drained off, I was left with a mass of sticky seeds (be warned - these seeds will get everywhere!).
I tried Toddy's suggestion of a cous-cous equivalent - simmering the seeds in water for about 8 minutes.
The result was a sort of unappetising looking porridge. The reason I say porridge is that the texture and taste was non dissimilar to porridge made with water - a glutinous, slightly sweet mass...and it did taste and feel like food. I'd certainly prefer to add some flavouring to it, or use it to bulk out a stew or something similar but it was OK.
Gathering the seeds was pretty easy and didn't take too much time, though it was a bit of effort to separate them from the chaff and I did lose a fair number of seeds remaining with the chaff. However, given the ease of gathering and the abundance of the plants, this doesn't seem too much of a problem.
Gordon Hillman suggests making a bannock from the flour - so the next job is to dry the seeds and try grinding them. The other thing I'd like to know is whether you can just cook up the seeds and chaff together (e.g. as a wayside snack if you don't have the means to separate out the seeds and chaff).
Geoff
A few weeks ago I found what must have been thousands of broad leaved plantains and remembered that the seeds were supposed to be edible. This is the common plant that has seed heads that look like rat tails (hence once of its common names rats-tail plantain).
There are usually a number of seed head per plant, typically 6"-12"long.
The leaves have pretty much died off by now (late October) but the plant is still easily recognisable.
I stripped the seeds off by hand, in situ, but you may want to cut off the seed heads and take them home to dry out a bit before stripping the seeds. I got a blister after collecting this lot!
One of the suggested methods of separating the seeds from the chaff it to parch the seeds (scorch them over an open flame so that the seed casings burn up), but I didn't have the means to do this so I tried gravity separation: putting batches of the gathered heads into a bowl of water - the seeds sink, while the chaff floats. This was fairly laborious and there were still quite a number of seeds mixed in with the chaff.
I ended up with a reasonable number of seeds, and the chaff.
You can see here that some of the seed casings still contain seeds.
Once drained off, I was left with a mass of sticky seeds (be warned - these seeds will get everywhere!).
I tried Toddy's suggestion of a cous-cous equivalent - simmering the seeds in water for about 8 minutes.
The result was a sort of unappetising looking porridge. The reason I say porridge is that the texture and taste was non dissimilar to porridge made with water - a glutinous, slightly sweet mass...and it did taste and feel like food. I'd certainly prefer to add some flavouring to it, or use it to bulk out a stew or something similar but it was OK.
Gathering the seeds was pretty easy and didn't take too much time, though it was a bit of effort to separate them from the chaff and I did lose a fair number of seeds remaining with the chaff. However, given the ease of gathering and the abundance of the plants, this doesn't seem too much of a problem.
Gordon Hillman suggests making a bannock from the flour - so the next job is to dry the seeds and try grinding them. The other thing I'd like to know is whether you can just cook up the seeds and chaff together (e.g. as a wayside snack if you don't have the means to separate out the seeds and chaff).
Geoff
Nice one. Impressive.
