If you get brain edema, fluid retention, liver problems, tend to inflammation, or struggle to detox, if you are sick of migraine from coffee withdrawal, find coffee keeps you up all night, or are worried about coffee dependency or its impact on anxiety states or mania, this may be the recipe for you!  And it’s high in vitamins!  And it’s GF/CF and it grows in your garden.

Dandelion coffee smells like coffee and it’s brown roasted granules even look somewhat like ground coffee.  But it’s not a bean.  It’s made from the root of the dandelion plant.

The trick is to be able to tell real dandelions from ‘false dandelions’.  Just because it has a raggedy yellow daisy-like flower doesn’t make it a dandelion.  Cat’s Ear , which has a thick, fuzzy leaf, not a smooth flaccid type, and Hawkbeard which has stiff stems not the hollow ones of dandelions, are not true dandelions.

True dandelions have ground level leaves which are the texture of lettuce and have ‘teeth’ like edges – Dent de Lion – means ‘tooth of the lion’.  True dandelions have this and hollow straw-like stems (you can also chew the bitter stems for liver detox).

So making Dandelion Coffee from scratch works like this:

1) get a pitch fork and find the biggest dandelion plant you can… one that’s been growing for a year or more.  Dig its root out.  Plants 1-2 years old will have smaller roots, but plants 3-4 years old will have tap roots the size of your index finger and look like pale carrots!  The bigger and chunkier the root the better.

2) remove the leaves (you can eat these in a salad for cheap eats!)  and clean up the carrot-like tap root with a scrubbing brush (the more roots you collect and scrub the more economical on water and roasting).

3) chop the root into small chunks for drying in a sunny window.

4) after 3-4 days of drying take these chopped roots and put them on a tray next time you are cooking a roast so you can capitalise on the energy use.  Let them roast for 1-2 hrs.  You’ll find they start to smell like coffee!

5) remove the tray of roasted dandelion root and allow to cool.

6) toss the roasted dandelion root into a blender and grind into granules

7) store in a small jar just as you would coffee (keep in fridge for freshness if you like)

8) to make coffee with them, you are best making them like a pot of tea because you’ll have to strain out the granules (they don’t desolve like coffee does).

You can make dandelion coffee as black coffee, or you can put heated rice milk or, heated nut milk onto it in a tea pot, let it steep, then pour through a tea strainer into a cup.

Like any food or drink, don’t over do it.  Remember life itself is a varied diet 😉

Enjoy.

Warmly,

Donna Williams

http://www.donnawilliams.net