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
Footnotes
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University of Maine Cooperative Extension, “Maine Home Garden News — October 2024,” 2024. ↩ ↩2
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North Carolina Cooperative Extension, “Jerusalem Artichoke,” accessed July 17, 2026. ↩
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Owen R. Fennema, ed., Food Chemistry, 3rd ed. (Marcel Dekker, 1996), PDF p. 1089. ↩
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Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, rev. ed. (Scribner, 2004), PDF p. 321. ↩ ↩2