Pass it on! The reason you can eat wild rice stem is because it has athlete's foot

The first time I saw Jiaobai was in Yunnan. On my aunt's grandmother's table, there was a dish of bamboo shoots fried with meat. However, the "bamboo shoots" felt a bit strange. They were not as crisp as usual, but more chewy. They were like dried bamboo shoots, but they were softer than dried bamboo shoots, especially the center, which felt a bit spongy. The taste was more like the corn stalks I chewed when I was a child, or the sugarcane residue after the sugar juice had been sucked out.

My great aunt called this dish "茭瓜", and it is one of my earliest memories of Yunnan vegetables.

White and plump wild rice stem | Micromesistius / wikimedia

Later, restaurants in the north also had rice stems fried with meat, and whole rice stems were also available in vegetable markets. These vegetables really look like melons and bamboo shoots, each one is white and plump, with residual green leaves on the top. However, this thing is neither a melon nor a bamboo shoot, but a "disease" plant stem. Don't worry, this infection will not affect human health, but will bring us delicious food.

Niche dishes all over the country

To talk about茭白, we must first talk about菰[gū]. For most people, the word菰 is a completely unfamiliar word, and as for what it is, that is even more difficult. Speaking of "茭白", many friends in the south are familiar with it. This kind of bamboo shoot-like vegetable is increasingly appearing in the vegetable markets in the north. In fact,茭白 is the enlarged stem of菰, and it is a deformed stem.

Zizania latifolia in the paddy field. Can you imagine that Zizania latifolia is its stem? | Forest and Kim Starr / flickr

Like many grass plants, the appearance of wild rice is not very eye-catching. These plants growing in paddy fields are like clumps of rice, but their leaves are longer and denser than those of rice. They live all over the country. They can be seen in paddy fields and swamps in Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Inner Mongolia, Hebei, Gansu, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Fujian, Guangdong, and Taiwan. Therefore, we Chinese have been dealing with wild rice for a long time.

Abandoned food crops

If we rank people by seniority in the circle of plant-based foods, then foxtail millet is definitely a top "person". This plant of the genus Zizania in the Poaceae family was a food crop that could be ranked on par with the "five grains" in those days. In the gathering era and the early stages of agricultural development, foxtail millet seeds - foxtail millet (Hu Diao rice) - once appeared as an important food. In ancient books such as "The Book of Zhou", the ancients even listed foxtail millet as the sixth grain along with the five grains of "rice, millet, sorghum, wheat, and beans [shū]".

Wild rice | ElinorD / wikipedia

In fact, all grasses have seeds rich in starch, but some seeds are too difficult to collect (such as African wild rice that grows in water), some seeds are too small (such as reeds), and some seeds cannot be collected regularly (such as bamboo). Relatively speaking, wild rice is a seed that is relatively easy to harvest and use. Moreover, wild rice is a perennial plant. Once planted, it can provide us with food for a long time, just like fruit trees.

However, the yield of wild rice is far from comparable to that of rice. In addition, the flowering period of wild rice is long, the seed maturity period is inconsistent, and the seeds fall off the ears as soon as they mature. It can be said that it is a very difficult grain crop to take care of. Therefore, people gradually alienated it.

After being abandoned by the mainstream grain crop team, cultivated foxtail millet soon found a new job in vegetable stalls, and those cultivated foxtail millet parasitized by black smut fungus made a comeback.

Ustilago officinalis, also known as Ustilago officinalis | collections.daff.qld.gov.au

A blessing in disguise for vegetables

The rhizomes of cultivated Zizania latifolia are deformed by fungal parasitism, producing bamboo shoot-like vegetables, which are Zizania latifolia. Not all cultivated Zizania latifolia can produce Zizania latifolia, and the stems of cultivated Zizania latifolia that are not infected maintain their original state, and are therefore called "male Zizania latifolia".

We usually think that plants and microorganisms have a life-and-death relationship, such as the Penicillium that makes citrus fruits rot, the Aspergillus flavus that makes peanuts toxic, and the yeast that makes apples rot. However, some microorganisms and plants can coexist peacefully and each gets what it needs.

Nodules on soybean roots, each containing billions of rhizobia | Stdout / wikimedia

The most typical symbiotic situations in nature are the root nodules of legumes and the symbiotic fungi of orchids. In these two typical parasitic events, plant landlords are dominant, and they deliberately set aside rooms for microorganisms to live in, which are invisible to the naked eye.

Of course, the microbial tenants do not live here for nothing, they serve the landlord. The rhizobia of legumes convert nitrogen in the air into fertilizers needed by the plants, while the symbiotic fungi of orchids can help the landlords absorb water and mineral nutrients. If we look at the root system of orchids, we can understand the mystery of symbiotic fungi - the roots of orchids are bare without a single root hair, because the fungi completely replace the root hairs of orchids. This is a typical symbiotic relationship in nature.

The roots of an orchid, without a single root hair | k4dordy / flickr

There is no such peace between smut and wild rice. Wild rice parasitized by smut can no longer produce seeds. Moreover, smut will secrete some chemicals to stimulate the stalks of wild rice to swell. You should know that the stems of normal wild rice are as thick as rice stems, and no thicker than the thickness of ordinary chopsticks, but the swollen stems are as thick as rolling pins. This allows smut to expand its living space to a great extent. When the growth period of wild rice ends, a large number of smut spores will be released to infect new plants.

In fact, cultivated wild rice has completely given up the ability to produce seeds. Even those that are not infected by smut only bloom but do not bear fruit, not to mention those that are infected and do not even bloom, because a lot of nutrients are used to grow fat stems. How to reproduce without seeds has become a big problem. Don't worry, wild rice can be cloned - just collect the wild rice roots after harvesting, sort them and plant them in the field, and you can harvest wild rice again in the next season.

The benefits of wild rice

In any case, wild rice is a very good vegetable, especially fresh wild rice contains a lot of sugar and amino acids, which makes it have a unique sweet taste. Slice the wild rice, add garlic cloves, and stir-fry it or stir-fry it with meat slices. Therefore, wild rice has found its place in the vegetable family.

Stir-fried wild rice stem | Elves in the jungle / Douguo Food

The stems and leaves of foxtail millet are also excellent fodder for cattle and sheep. At the same time, they are also important for the ecology of the marsh, providing a shelter for fish to overwinter and also serving as anchors for the banks. It seems that foxtail millet, once one of the six grains, can still play a role today.

Precious corn truffles

Coincidentally, in nature, the crops infected by smut fungus are not only wild rice, and the vegetables produced are not only wild rice stems. Corn, a distant relative of wild rice, can also be infected by smut fungus, forming delicious corn truffles. However, the part where the smut fungus parasitizes is not the corn stalk, but the corn cob. The corn kernels invaded by smut fungus will swell abnormally, and the color will also change to gray-black. Although they cannot form normal corn kernels, these abnormal kernels, known as "corn truffles", are also delicious.

Corn Truffles | Kai Hirdes / wikimedia

By the way, truffle is the general name for a type of fungus in the genus Truffle. There are about 10 species discovered so far, most of which grow at the roots of broad-leaved trees such as pine, oak, and oak. Truffles have a special smell and are loved by those who love them. Large pieces of truffles are expensive and are a food that gourmets yearn for.

Author: Shi Jun

This article comes from the Species Calendar, welcome to forward

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