Description

Tiger nut
Cyperus esculentus L.

Annual plant with edible tubers. Also known as: earth almond, chufa nut. Can be eaten raw, grilled. Makes an excellent vegetable milk “horchata de chufa”, a traditional Spanish drink with a delicious, sweet taste. It can also be used to make flour or extract oil. Egyptian heirloom vegetable. Easy to grow. 50 cm tall plant resembling a grass. Grows well in container. Does not survive winter and is not invasive in our hardiness zone 4b, but a few have survived in the greenhouse. Harvesting, cleaning and drying tiger nuts.

Sow indoors in early April. 2 cm deep. Transplant after any risk of frost. 15 cm between plants. Germination 4-30 days at 28-30°C.

Germination: 90% in November 2024
Ecological seeds produced at Catherine’s Ornamental Garden.

Note
Tiger nuts are harvested in autumn, when the leaves are quite dry, or immediately after a frost. If you grow it in a pot, harvesting is fairly easy. We grow them in the ground. We loosen the soil with a fork as for carrots, then we pull up the plants. Tubers still attached to the roots can then be picked up.

Cleaning is done immediately. Take a container adapted to the quantity you have: a strainer, a bucket, a hamster cage, etc. Then spray with a good garden spray gun. The more pressure, the better. We spray with the pressure washer and remove as much of the muddy water as possible. It takes us 20 to 30 minutes to clean a 30-foot bed (±180 plants). We take the opportunity to remove the remaining rocks. The wet tubers are then spread out in front of a fan to dry quickly. Once dry, we transfer them to a large mesh laundry bag, which we hang in the garage for a few weeks for final curing. We can then store our harvest in a paper bag, just as we store garlic.

Some tiger nut milk recipes contain added sugar, but tiger nuts are naturally sweet and delicious. We prefer it plain, with just 2 ingredients: tiger nuts and water.

We use a NutriBullet blender to reduce tiger nuts to powder. It is then passed through a fine sieve. Tigernut flour is used in exactly the same way as almond powder: Recipes with almond powder – without almonds. 🙂 🙂