Choice and storage

Jicamas may be accessible year-round within the markets. Typically, they’re imported from Central American international locations via land routes and flood the USA markets throughout spring and summer season.

Select well-formed, agency, spherical, medium-sized tubers. Keep away from tender, shriveled, or tubers with floor cuts, cracks, and bruised pores and skin.

As soon as at house, jicamas may be saved very like potatoes. They’ve a very good shelf life and hold properly in a cool, dry, darkish place for about 2-4 weeks. Publicity to a temperature beneath 10 °C ends in chill-induced modifications in
coloration and texture. Additionally, extended storage converts its starch into sugar, which makes the roots much less sought-after in savory dishes.

Lower sections, cubes, or slices, nevertheless, ought to be positioned contained in the fridge.

Preparation and serving strategies

Wash in cool working water and dry mop similar to in different tubers. Peel off the thick fibrous pores and skin utilizing a vegetable peeler or paring knife. Pores and skin and different plant components carry rotenone, an natural poison, and subsequently, ought to be discarded. It then may be lower into cubes, sliced, or chopped into high quality strips within the methods desired.

Contemporary jicama is used very like a vegetable and is a crucial starch supply in a lot of Central America. It stays crisp when cooked,
making it one of many fantastic greens in stir-fries.

Listed here are some serving suggestions:

• Uncooked jicama has candy, succulent apple like fruity style. In lots of components of Mexico, recent tubers are lower into cubes/sticks and sprinkled with lime juice, salt, and dressed with olive oil and paprika or floor chili pepper and loved!

• Jicama is a favourite root vegetable in Mexican cooking the place it’s utilized in salads, slaw, stews, stir-fries, soups, and so forth.
  It mixes properly with different frequent greens and fruits like orange, pineapple, carrot, inexperienced beans in addition to with poultry, meat, and seafood.

• Outdoors of the American continent, this tuber is among the many fashionable starch roots in lots of south and southeast areas. In Malaysia, the place it is named bengkoang, recent younger tubers are sliced and eaten with different fruits like pineapple, apple,
  uncooked mango, candy potato, and so forth, in rujak.

• In Indonesia, they served with very like Malayan salad however with added rujak sauce created from palm sugar, tamarind, shrimp paste, chili peppers, and sautéed peanut
  paste. Additionally, as a rujak tumbuk, all of the substances talked about above are floor in a picket mortar and served on a banana leaf.

• In Jap India states of West Bengal, Odisha, and Bangladesh, shankaalu is eaten as mouth-watering road meals ‘chaat recipe’ paired with starfruit, chili and salt powder and lemon juice.

• Other than salads, one other fashionable oriental dish that makes use of jicama and turnips is popiah, a Fujian/Chaozhou-style recent spring roll.

Security profile

Jicama plant incorporates vital ranges of fat-soluble natural toxin, rotenone. This toxin is concentrated particularly within the leaf tops, stems, and seed pods however at a lot decrease concentrations within the roots. A number of research discovered that it’s linked to the event of Parkinson’s illness.

Nevertheless, peeled roots are secure for human consumption, together with in kids. Rotenone works on the mobile degree inhibiting a number of metabolic enzymes like NADH dehydrogenase within the mitochondria. Outdoors, it’s used as an environmentally secure broad-spectrum insecticide, piscicide (to poison fish), and pesticide. (Medical disclaimer).

≻≻-Again to Greens from Jicama vitamin. Go to right here for a formidable listing of greens with full illustrations of their vitamin info and
well being advantages.

≻≻-Again to Dwelling web page.

Additional Assets:

1. USDA Nationwide Nutrient Database.

2. Stanford Faculty of Drugs Most cancers info Web page- Diet to Scale back Most cancers Threat.

3. Norton, L. B. 1943. Rotenone within the yam bean (Pachyrrhizus erosus).

4. Quantification of rotenone in seeds of various species of yam bean (Pachyrhizus sp.) by a SPE HPLC–UV technique. PDF.