Saturday, June 27, 2009
By Karen Neill Special to the News & Record
My husband thought he had tasted almost all the vegetables that one could grow. After all, being married to a horticulturist, what would you expect?
We've planted a garden of tomatoes, beans and squash, but as I like to experiment, I've recently tried many of the Asian vegetables and some new, unusual cultivars.
There are some he likes, some he despises and others he tolerates, if cooked a certain way.
But this weekend in the frozen food section of the grocery store, he discovered a vegetable we haven't grown -- edamame.
In fact, I have talked with a number of folks who have never heard of edamame.
With a little help from the National Gardening Bureau, I encourage you to think about these wonderful plants for next year's garden.
This ancient Asian vegetable is growing in popularity in America. In Japan, the pods are popped open and eaten out of hand as we would eat peanuts out of the shell -- the perfect accompaniment to a frosty glass of beer, or so I told him. I have seen them planted in snacking gardens on school grounds for the kids to pick and eat while in the garden.
Edamame translates as "beans on branches." The plants produce bunches of beans on well-branched, shrubby plants.
Unlike regular soybeans which dry on the plant, edamame pods are picked before they ripen. Each pod contains two or three delicious beans with a sweet, nutty flavor that appeals to children and adults.
Edamame, (Glycine max), is really just a soybean, albeit a specialty soybean. Records indicate its use in China (known there as mao dou) more than 2,200 years ago. From China, it was introduced to Japan, where it was consumed for centuries before it was documented in the 927 A.D. Engishiki. This guide about trade in agricultural commodities depicts the fresh soy bean pods as offerings in Buddhist temples
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