Just took these drumsticks out of the freezer.
Boiled and sauteed with seasoning in coconut oil they are yummy and healthy.
@Tim_Motis has been testing out different ways of cooking and eating pods as well! We used to think at ECHO that you had to eat the pods young (the girth of a pencil), but we have found them to be tasty even large (but still green).
It’s great to hear of folks utilizing moringa pods! Thank you, Brother Galen, for sharing your method and photo.
I’ve come to appreciate moringa trees in my garden, not just for the leaves and leaf powder, but also for the pods. Now that the summer rains are starting, I am letting my trees produce pods that I can eat before I prune them back to harvest the leaves and plant something like sweetpotatoe underneath.
Here is a photo of pods on my trees here in Fort Myers, Florida:
I’ll share what I have been doing to prepare the pods for eating. First, I cut the pods into sections, just like Brother Galen showed:
Then I put the pods in a pan of boiling water and let them boil for 14-15 minutes (closer to 15 for the largest pods).
After boiling, I can eat some right away and/or keep some in the fridge for later. I find that the boiled pods naturally split lengthwise as shown on the plate below:
I then sprinkle some seasoning on them. You could add salt and use whatever seasoning(s) you like. From the previous post, it looks like you can sautee them, after boiling, with seasoning—the coconut oil sounds great! To eat, I run a pod section across my front teeth, consume the pulp and seeds, and discard the fibrous outer skin of the pod.
I like the thicker pods because they have more pulp. There is a point, though, at which the pods become too fibrous. Here is a photo of a little culinary trial I did, with the largest pods in the middle of the cutting board and some slightly narrower pods around them:
The pods in the middle turned out to be too large/mature. Even with a longer boiling time, the pulp remained fibrous and the seeds did not soften. Here is what the fibrous pods looked like after boiling:
After a while, you can figure out what size pods you like.
Here is a link to an abstract on the nutrition of immature leaves and pods of Moringa oleifera: Nutrient and Antinutrient Contents in Raw and Cooked Young Leaves and Immature Pods Of Moringa oleifera, Lam: Ecology of Food and Nutrition: Vol 42, No 6
The authors conclude that while some nutrients are lost in the cooking process, enough is retained to make immature pods a good source of nutrients.
If you have additional insights or methods of preparing moringa, please share!
Thanks for sharing those pics!
Beautiful tree. It is my favorite, so I grow lots of them from seeds and cuttings.
Our loving Father is so good to give us this “miracle tree”
My profile here has a moringa tree as the background photo.
Maybe I should make a moringa tshirt? Haha