A Wild Food Experiment: Cattail Rootstalk Flour

by Holly Schubert

We recently had to remove some cattails from one of the ponds at Lutherlyn. They were growing alongside the canoe dock and blocking access to the dock. It was fairly easy to get to them in mid-March because this lake is drained every winter and allowed to refill every spring. Because the lake had not been filled yet, the cattails were not underwater as they normally would be when the lake is full, so they were much easier to dig out!  

It was neat to pull the roots up from just under the soil, and to see easily what the root system looks like. Our What is it Wednesday post from March 31 was on the cattail roots. 

What is it Wednesday: March 31, 2021 -- Cattail Roots

As that post points out, the majority of what we see here is actually the rootstalk - the horizontal stem that grows just under the soil. Cattail rootstalks are very starchy, and can be used to make flour. Since we had so many cattail rootstalks dug up, I decided to use what we would otherwise just throw out to make some cattail rootstalk flour. 

The first step, after digging them up, was to cut the useable pieces of rootstalk off of the rest of the plant debris. I kept all the horizontal pieces and cut off the parts where the stalks growing upward join the rootstalk, and any sections that looked damaged. I ended up with a pile this big (other plant pieces in the background): 

 

I took them home and hosed them off, and ended up with a large bucket all the way full and a planter about 2/3 full of rootstalk pieces. 

The outside of the roostalk is spongy and fibrous, much like the stalks and leaves of cattails, and also has the stringy and hairy actual roots growing off of it. To get to the part used for flour, you have to peel off this outer layer. What's left behind is the starchy core, with long strands of tough fiber running through it. I peeled all the rootstalks in the planter, and ended up with the pieces in the red bin below, The peeled outer parts left over in the planter will be thrown out (composted in the woods somewhere dry enough that they won't accidentally root and spread cattails into a place we don't want them).  

Peeling them took about 45 minutes and was fairly easy to do with a pocketknife.

Afterwards, I put all the peeled pieces in a tray with water in it. 

Then I started mushing up the pieces in the water, to break the starch out of the fibers. I found that the best way to do this was to start by holding the end of a piece between my thumb and forefinger, then hold my other thumb and forefinger about an inch down the piece, then kind of breaking it and wiggling that small section between them back and forth between my fingers, (a bit like cracking open a chemical light-stick). Working from one end of the piece to the other, breaking and wiggling and prying a little, I used my fingers and thumbs to work the starchy bits out of the fibers. 

After I broke up and worked through all the pieces I had a lot of starchy water in the tray, but the tangle of fibers from the pieces still had a lot of starch in them too. So I put more water in a bowl, and squeezed and worked the fibers in the water until I got most of the remaining starch out. That left me with just a clump of the fibrous pieces, and two containers of water with lots of starch mixed in it. This part of the process took about another 45 minutes. 

The starch was already settling to the bottom of the bowl and tray shortly after I was done breaking apart the fibers. After letting it settle overnight it was pretty easy to pour off the majority of the water without disturbing the starch settled on the bottom, so what was left behind was just the wet starch. 

Luckily, after that I was busy for a few days, and didn't really have the time or attention to devote to working on the flour. This was great because it made it easy to just let it sit for about a week to dry out. (It was also lucky that we had several warm dry days in a row that were good for drying - I just let the bowl and tray sit out on my dining room table.) 

First it got damp and clumpy
(I scraped it up a bit with a fork to see what the consistency was like) 

and eventually it got dry and hard.
At that point it was easy to break up into powdery clusters.

 

The next step is to break up the clusters into powder as fine as you can make it. I did this mostly just by crushing the pieces between my thumb and finger to break them up. You could also do this with a mortar and pestle, but I didn't use those until later. Just using my fingers, I got to where I had some fairly fine powder, and some harder clumps that didn't break up as easily. I sifted them so the powder and hard clumps were separate. 

Then I used the mortar and pestle to grind the hard clumps into fine powder.
(This worked very well and I wonder if I should have done all of it this way.)

I would grind, sift, and grind again to get as much of it as I could broken down. In the end I only had a small handful that I couldn't get ground into a finer powder (and it didn't seem necessary to expend a lot of effort to get that last bit). 

I ended up with maybe 3/4 of a cup of flour. 

That's not a lot of flour, but I only used about 1/3 of the cattails I had collected, and I didn't feel like any part of the process was particularly arduous or difficult. No one part of it was even really time-consuming, but it does take a while from start to finish because digging, cutting, and peeling/washing all took place on separate days, then drying takes several days. I didn't sit down and break it into flour all at one time - I just worked a little of it at a time when I felt like it, so that happened over another 2 or 3 days (maybe another 45 minutes total for that part). 

Of course the final step is actually using the flour to make food! I have a simple flatbread recipe that just uses flour, water, and oil. I used 1/2 Cup of whole-wheat flour, and 1/2 Cup of cattail flour (and a little salt) with 1/3 Cup of water and about 1/6 Cup of oil (an eyeball guess). Mixed all together, divided into balls, flattened, and cooked in a pan with a little non-stick spray: 

That amount made six cakes like the ones above, a little bigger than the palm of my hand. (They're a bit like johnnycakes made with flour instead of cornmeal.) They tasted pretty much the same as when I make them with 100% whole wheat flour! I thought maybe they would have a bit of the flavor of cattails, like the flavor and smell of cattail shoots, but it was not noticeable at all. 

It would be interesting to try using 100% cattail flour. The texture of cattail starch is kindof slimy (also a bit like the sliminess in between layers in cattail shoots), although once it dries that sliminess is not noticeable in the flour. I'm not sure how that texture would function as a flour on its own. I am not a baker and have almost no experience in working with different kinds of flour and other ingredients to create the right consistencies, but it would be fun to experiment with. I have about 1/4 cup of the flour left, and I think I will try adding it to Bisquick and see what kind of biscuits I get. 

I haven't gotten around to working with the large bucket of rootstalk pieces, and they were dug up several weeks ago. I suspect that they are no longer in good condition to use - maybe they've gotten moldy or rotten or otherwise not good. But I will check them and if they're still useable I think I will make more flour! It's a pretty easy process and it would be fun to try out more ways of using the flour (cattail pancakes?). 

Remember to only use cattails as food if they are growing in very clean water - cattails are great filter plants, which means they absorb a lot of what is in the water where they grow, both good and bad. It's also a good idea to always cook cattails before eating them, even just for a few minutes, in case they have bacteria in them from the water. 

Also, when eating a new wild food, it's always a good idea to try a small amount first, just in case it doesn't agree with you. I forgot this, was hungry, and ate 4 cakes pretty quickly! THEN I remembered this guideline...but luckily I was fine and had no problems with eating the cattail bread. 

It's always a delight to learn about new ways that we can be sustained by the earth and the ecosystems around us. This was definitely a wild food experiment worth spending a little time on!