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Jerusalem Artichoke

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Helianthus tuberosus

Jerusalem artichoke is a sunflower-family perennial grown for its knobbly underground tubers. It is native to North America and has a long Northeast food history.1

It is more closely related to sunflower than to the globe artichoke. In some Indigenous “Seven Sisters” accounts from the Northeast, it appears alongside corn, beans, squash, sunflower, and other regional crops.1

Neither half of the English name is botanically helpful: the plant is native to North America rather than Jerusalem, and the food part is a tuber rather than the flower bud eaten from a globe artichoke.2

Unlike a potato, the tuber stores little starch. Its principal reserve is inulin, a long chain of fructose units; human digestive enzymes do not break those chains down efficiently, so intestinal microbes do instead, which can make a large portion uncomfortable.34 Long, low cooking can break much of the inulin into digestible fructose, producing a markedly sweeter, softer, translucent-brown result.4

The plant is a tall perennial sunflower that can spread aggressively from leftover tubers, which is part of the reason Native Plant Trust treats it as both a native food plant and a potentially weedy garden subject.5 In New England it occurs in all six states, especially in fields, stream banks, disturbed ground, and old cultivation sites. The edible part is an underground storage stem rather than a true root, and its irregular knobs bruise and dehydrate more easily than a smooth potato.6

That storage chemistry gives the tuber a different seasonal rhythm from a potato. The inulin remains a reserve carbohydrate in the ground, and cold conditions can shift the balance toward sweeter flavor; keeping the crop in the soil until needed is therefore practical where the ground stays workable. The same inulin that makes the tuber interesting as a low-starch crop also explains its reputation for digestive discomfort, so it is a food with a distinctive structural carbohydrate rather than a direct potato substitute.36

Footnotes

  1. University of Maine Cooperative Extension, “Maine Home Garden News — October 2024,” 2024. ↩ ↩2

  2. North Carolina Cooperative Extension, “Jerusalem Artichoke,” accessed July 17, 2026. ↩

  3. Owen R. Fennema, ed., Food Chemistry, 3rd ed. (Marcel Dekker, 1996), PDF p. 1089. ↩ ↩2

  4. Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, rev. ed. (Scribner, 2004), PDF p. 321. ↩ ↩2

  5. Native Plant Trust, “Helianthus tuberosus — tuberous sunflower,” accessed September 6, 2026. ↩

  6. U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service, “The Commercial Storage of Fruits, Vegetables, and Florist and Nursery Stocks,” Agriculture Handbook 66, accessed September 6, 2026. ↩ ↩2

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