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Processing the tubers

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Keen followers of Your Life Your Planet will have seen the tubers of turmeric and ginger harvested from my townhouse pot garden last week. This week I have started processing them.

The photos below, provide an idea of what the various stages look like.

Ginger and turmeric tubers
Ginger and turmeric pulled and washed from pot plants – The jars, show last year’s crop.
peeled and sliced turmeric. Only the large pieces were peeled.
Break them into individual sausages, peel the old crusty ones and slice the lot a couple of millimetres thick.
The sliced turmeric in the oven, ready to be driec
Lay them out on baking trays and put them in an oven on the lowest heat for a day or two.
When they are crisp (not leathery) and crack when you try to bend them, they are ready for the coffee grinder
The dried turmeric in the coffee grinder
Orange and yellow turmeric powder. The yellow powder has more curcumin.
And finally, the powder

Peeling them makes them dry more quickly and results in a finer powder with a cleaner colour. In the picture above, the pieces with the skin on are still leathery and bendable.They need to be dried for at least another four hours.

If you have lots of small tubers, though, peeling will remove \the bulk of your product. I only peel the big pieces, waiting for the day when my crop is large enough that I can keep the small pieces for fresh product and grind only the big ones.

Note the single orange piece in the picture of the dried pieces. The difference in the colour is quite obvious as soon as you cut the tuber. There are no organge pieces in the pictures of the sliced tubers.

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