Species sheet · The Edible River
Water chestnut
A crunch that survives every kind of cooking.
- Raw, peeled, in a salad or a dessert
- Stir-fried with vegetables and prawns
- Chopped into a dumpling or meatball filling
- In French
- Châtaigne d'eau
- Scientific name
- Eleocharis dulcis
- In the water
- A marsh sedge of tropical Asia grown in flooded paddies in calm, shallow water. The part you eat is the corm buried in the mud.
- Season & buying
- Harvested late in the season once the stems turn yellow; sold fresh in Asian grocers and canned all year round.
- Common length
- ~100 cm
- How to identify it
- Green, tubular, leafless stems standing above the water
Round corm with dark brown skin, about the size of a walnut
White, juicy, crisp flesh under the skin
On the plate
White, juicy flesh, sweet like a very crisp pear, with almost no aroma.
Avoid: Peeling it ahead and leaving it in the open: it browns and loses its juice; peel at the last minute.
It stays crunchy after an hour on the stove: its cell walls are bonded by compounds that heat does not undo.
In Umay recipes
One Umay recipe calls for it.
