Yacon

Smallanthus sonchifolius · Root vegetable

40 pairings

Yacon (Smallanthus sonchifolius) is the crisp, juicy, refreshingly sweet storage root of an Andean daisy relative — a tuber with the wet crunch of an apple or water chestnut and a flavour somewhere between pear, watermelon and mild celery. Despite tasting sweet, almost none of its sugar is digestible: it stores carbohydrate mainly as the prebiotic fibre inulin and fructooligosaccharides, so it is very low in usable calories.

Picking a good onedrag

Dense, hard, glassy at the cutSlack, wrinkled, weeping at the ends

Cured and sweetThe usual shop root: time turns its fructans to free sugar. Peel, then raw in batons or slaw. Those fructans are a FODMAP, so a big plateful bloats some people.Everyday best

SkinMatte tan and dry, a few shallow scuffs

The heftDense still, firm under thumb pressure

The cut endCorky and healed over, dry to the touch

The smellClean and faintly sweet, close to neutral

What to look for, from dense, hard, glassy at the cut to slack, wrinkled, weeping at the ends.

Preparing