Greetings my beautiful lovelies! It's Emmy.
Welcome back to another episode of Hard Times
where I explore food and recipes
from times of food scarcity.
Today, I'm going to be returning to the time of the Civil War, and I'm going to be making
dandelion coffee. Now it wasn't until
recently, actually, on my trip to
Gettysburg with my family, that I
realized the importance of coffee in war --
this gave the troops energy to march,
to fight, to rally -- it was so important!
Now, generally speaking, the Union Army
did not have to worry about supplies and
provisions -- all of that was kind of laid
out in terms of railroads; and supplies
were relatively plentiful; as opposed to
the Confederacy: supply chains were often broken
and things like coffee were often
hard to come by, so soldiers were very
resourceful and found many different
ways to come up with a coffee-like drink.
It did not contain the caffeine, of
course, but at least it was a hot beverage
that tasted a bit like coffee.
Some common coffee alternatives included
acorns, okra seeds, dried persimmon, dried sweet potato, and dandelion roots,
just to name a few. There is lots of lots of ones that -- oh chicory was a big one as well!
So there are lots of different things that
people used to create a coffee-like drink.
Now, here in New England we're coming
well into spring and dandelions are
everywhere -- please don't spray your
dandelions! They are so incredible!
Namely if you have a beekeeper or bees around,
or if you care about bees that's one of
the first nectar sources for the bees:
they're really, really important. So my
backyard is full of dandelions: I find
them very cheerful, and historically
dandelions were very, very useful. You
could eat their greens; you could make a
tea or a tincture out of the roots....
So, the first thing you want to do is find a clean source of dandelions
that are pesticides/herbicides/dog-free,
and that happens to be my backyard.
So I've got myself a cultivator.
So let's go ahead and harvest some dandelion roots.
If you haven't heard, these are my chickens.
Let's visit them. Hi ladies! Would you
like to come out?
The girls have just turned one-years-old.
Hi! Hi, are you gonna let me pet you?
Yes?
It's nice to see you. Hi. That's my Australorp. We've got two Rhode Island Reds.
Come here, girl! And we've got the beautiful Buffs -- Buff Orpingtons. All right, are you guys
gonna go peck around? All right,
enjoy your day!
It's best to get young
dandelions even before they produced a
flower because that means more of the
energy has gone into creating the
taproot which is what we want in this case.
I'm digging along the root; and
we've been getting lots of rain recently,
so the ground is nice and soft.
Hi girls!
There's the taproot. That's what we want.
You're gonna eat...you guys are gonna eat
my dandelions?
I can hear the bees buzzing overhead.
Ooh, here we go! Yes! Can you see that? This one's gonna be a good one. Nice! Look at that.
Yes! So, doing it by hand, rather than
using a cultivator, gives you longer roots
which is nice. So, I'm gonna
snap off this top part right here,
and then I'm gonna keep that root which is already pretty clean.
So once you've harvested your dandelions --
I harvested probably about twenty-five of them --
you're going to cut off the leafy...
You can save these and clean them up and use
them for dandelion salads -- if you haven't
seen that Depression-era recipe video, I
will put the link above and down below --
delicious, nice bitter kind of salad, kind
of similar to arugula,
but comes straight out of your backyard
and it's free. Oh, I should also mention
because it's dandelion season, you
can also use their blossoms to make a
dandelion wine, which I've done, so look
for that video coming up soon.
It will take some time for the wine to ferment
and to age so I'm waiting for that to
happen before I do the whole kind of
tasting, so look for that video soon. But
if you want to make dandelion wine the
time is now
so yeah, start picking your dandelions!
All righty, back to this. So now that you've
got these nice roots, we're going to
clean as much of the soil off of them
as possible outside. Bring them inside
and then use a scrub brush, and, again, remove
as much of the soil as possible and use
copious amounts of cold water to get
them nice and clean. Next, we're going to
chop them up into small pieces,
and then we're gonna place them on a baking tray
in a single layer, then we're gonna
place this in a 200℉ oven for an hour or two -- depending on how big
your pieces are -- every fifteen minutes or so
you might want to give them a little bit
of toss, turn them over. And you just want
to get them nice and dry. So next we're
gonna heat up our oven to 350°.
Place the pieces back into the oven,
and we're going to roast these, anywhere from
fifteen to forty-five minutes depending on how big
your pieces are, and how dark you want
your roast.
I end up roasting mine for about forty minutes and they are very dry.
So I tasted the root before I roasted them,
and they're quite bitter, but it was
so interesting: as I was
roasting these pieces, a very sweet aroma
started coming out of the oven.
It smelled a bit like sweet potatoes. It was
kind of amazing. My husband actually
thought I was baking something -- he's like
"Are you baking something sweet?" I'm like. "No,
honey, it's just dandelion root."  But it
smelled so pleasant and lovely and that
only came out when I started increasing
the temperature 350 degrees and then those
smells started to come out. So I'm
very curious to see what this tastes like.
So I've got two cups of water here,
and we're gonna bring this up to a boil. I'm going to add
two tablespoons of my dried
and roasted dandelion roots.
One...
two.
Ahh, it smells great! It
already smells nutty and that kind of
sweet sweet potato aroma is happening. So now we're gonna let this boil for ten
minutes and then we can have a cup of
dandelion coffee.
All righty, so it's been ten minutes since I started boiling my dandelion coffee
I'm gonna turn off the heat.
I'm gonna use a little strainer
here, and strain out the root.
And it's darkened up a whole lot -- although
essentially we're still making a tea --
this has taken on the color of coffee.
Kind of amazing!
All righty, now for the moment of truth.
Let's give this a taste.
Mm, it smells really good -- not
exactly like coffee. It smells roasted
and nutty; toasted; sweet; a little bit like
potato skins which is not surprising
because this did come from the soil.
All righty, cheers!
Huh! Wow!
It is really similar to coffee...in the
sense that it has a distinctive
bitterness to it -- a very clear pronounced
bitterness.
But it is very smooth.
Definitely in the family of flavors of
coffee. It doesn't have that aftertaste:
that kind of lingering aftertaste of
coffee though but it does have its kind
of distinctive bitterness. None of the
acid though. It's not acidic at all.
Depending on the type of bean and the
type of the roast, coffee can be quite acidic.
This doesn't have any of that
acidity. I've tasted coffee alternatives
before, and this gets pretty close.
It really captures the bitterness of coffee.
Of course I'm drinking this black --
if you were to add some milk and some sugar,
perhaps it would be more like what
you're accustomed to -- but I usually drink
my coffee black and this is quite
similar. But that sweet potato smell that
I was telling you about that I smelled
when I was roasting it -- that's the kind
of flavor you get: sweet potato-y;
a little bit of the soil... It's good. I
like it!
The flavor is a little bit different:
it's a little bit more popcorn-y, toasty
more almost bread-like than coffee
itself. Coffee beans in itself depending
again on the roast and the type of
beans is really full-bodied -- this is
also a little bit thinner in texture in
terms of mouthfeel; again, that's
gonna depend on the style of roast and
how strong you make your coffee -- I'm sure
I could have made this stronger as well,
but in terms of just mouthfeel this does
feel a little bit thinner, but as a
coffee alternative or substitute this is
a very good one! And it came just out of
my backyard. So I'm definitely gonna go
back to my yard and pull up more dandelion roots to be making more dried
dandelion root because it is a great
alternative to coffee: caffeine-free but
it's a hot beverage with a nice
bitterness that is very reminiscent of coffee!
I'm pretty impressed with that. So
there you have it: a backyard coffee
substitute that's actually pretty
stinkin' good. If you've got some
dandelions around why not try it for
yourself?
Alrighty, I hope you guys enjoyed that
one; I hope you guys learned something;
be sure to check out the Hard Times
playlist where I explore other historical recipes;
share this video with your
friends; follow me on social media; like
this video; subscribe; and I shall see you
in the next one.
Toodaloo! Take care! Byeee!!
I'm working out! Oh yeah!
