The Truth About Water Lily Root As Survival Food 

The simple fact that you are willing to do all this research at the expense of your own discomfort for others says a lot about your character Mr. Woodbeard!

Place lily root in pot with large rock, cover with water and boil. Throw away root and eat rock. (Rock can be tenderized by marinating in Kraft Italian Salad Dressing for several eons.)

Finally! An honest survival channel. I have been searching for something like this since les stroud dropped off the map. Thank you for taking your time to do this. I have been attending different survival and woodsman camps since the early 80s, and most of my free time is spent in the woods, but like you have huge doubts about how long I could really sustain myself, much less my family.

Good stuff, thanks for putting in the proper research.

I like that you back things up by doing them and not repeating what you just heard!Very well done!!

I'm glad you have put these videos up. it really shows what you can use and what you can't. also that it is impossible to live on your own in the Forest. I always thought you could but you have shown clearly that you need community

Interesting experimentation. Thanks for sharing your findings.

Thank you for putting in the legwork and sharing your results with us.

Very informative video, thanks. My wife, who is Chinese, eats lily root in China. She says you should not boil it as the boiling process causes the root to shrink and the taste to intensify. She recommends soaking it for 24 hours in water around 30-40 degrees C (86- 104 Deg F) then it is OK. It is used in China as medicine for its bitterness which is essential.

This is my favorite channel. Thanks for taking the time to test this. I would watch another challenge before that ALONE crap. Ontario Rocks!

Man you put a ton of work into this for such a let down (although you might have expected it). I wouldn't think of eating this unless survival got real but now I know not to waste my time on it. Thank you for your work in this video!

Hi Wooded: Just the facts. that will save me ever screwing around with water lily. Thanks for your sharing. You have a very brave & patient family. Brian 76

Awesome video! Here in Florida we have “Spatterdock”. I’ve always wondered if they were edible. This gave me a good idea of what to expect! I guess these are mainly a last resort 😂

Nice test. I had read that the water Lilly was really bitter in the AF Bourbeau book survivethon. I tasted the root before but haven't tried boiling in lots of changes of water... not very appetizing. Lol I loved seeing your families reaction to it ! :) cool video my friend.

The edibility question has been answered without any doubt! Thanks!

Damn... Thanks man. I live in a house on pilings above thousands of these.... was hoping I could eat them and enjoy them. I'll try it anyway but was wanting more of a "wow, this is amazing" reaction.

Probably try leaching it also in several changes of water to remove the acrid compounds prior to cooking as well might help.

Great video, first time I saw the root or tuber of the water lily, I had no idea what it was. Finally noticed the water lily pads and flowers growing out of them. Never would have thought to try and eat one as they looked entirely disgusting. Thanks for the video though. I had a great laugh and showed it to a friend who also enjoyed your family's reaction to it all. Especially when your son told his mom she had to try the baked one after you spit it out. Hahaha, kids got a good sense of humour when he likes watching their parents eat vile things. God bless and take care eh.

Cool to see your family getting onboard with your experiment. Great video, and very informative. Water lily is out!

Cute family test. Educational as well. Thanks!

That was some good information thanks.

Hi love your experiment. Have you tried soaking the sliced/unsliced lily root in water for about 3-5 days? Changing the water everyday. This is one of the method of making the poisonous Dioscorea daemona edible. The other one is to left it in a streaming water/river for 3-5 days. Need to peel off the skin first. Maybe can help with removing the undesirable taste or smell.

The way you prepared this Lilly reminds me of how an old lady would cook rubarb leaves during the depression. She kept boiling and steeping the poison out of them.

it's really scarey to think how much old knowledge has been lost.

Excellent video. I have never been able to handle it.

I love how skeptical your family looks at the start!

Great taste test Chris!! If seasoning and oil won't make it good nothing will!! Epic when your son says "Im not going to eat it" Haaha!! TFS this test in the end Lily root is off my menu! Pike will have to do!

I have been thinking about this for quiet a bit, and something occurred to me. Why not grate the root into a paste for use as a condiment similar to wasabi? It might be a good way to flavor foods in the wild.

Would be interesting to see if on the final boil it was boiled in saltwater or sugar water to see if it made a difference in the bitter and palatable area,

Lily root is a delicacy in the northern part of Botswana. It is mixed and slow cooked with beef until tender, then you pound/mesh to make a tasty dish. The beef is usually more on the fatty side.

Good job on your videos.

So have you made any plans for the next season of wilderness living challenge?

At one point, Dear Beardsman, you say the rhizome smells like elder flower, which reminded me that here in the Czech Republic people used to dip elder flowers in batter and fry them like pancakes.

I was wonder if you can reach to regard this root I would love purchase some for you

Lmao good but funny video, and I tried arrowhead roots once I found the same thing I couldn't get that taste out no matter how many times I boiled them.

Wow brave move getting the family to be test it 😂😂. Great video, Great subject 👍

Can you regrow it if I found one on shore?

You are showing two different species, the yellow pond lily (Nuphar lutea) and the white water lily (Nymphaea odorata) the one with white flowers and round leaves with a notch. Have you tried the Nymphaea as well?

Any 1 tried with sugar? It s the opposite of bitter. For experiment, recommended nice brown sugar. No cheap white. Apparently tribes in Papa New have water lily as part of their diet. And apparently ,some part of the plant turned in to a flour. Maybe the make some kinda bread/ cake.

Is it possible that you collected Nuphar lutea (yellow water Lilly) instead of Nymphaea odorata (white water Lilly)

Great video

I see your No Frills seasonings, lol. Were you purposely keeping the front labels on your food items hidden from view? You should make more videos of trying to cook various wild edibles. I'm VERY interested in wild edibles but unfortunately haven't had much chance to go out and find them.

looks good! those lillies look great for frog fishing too

If you transplant them and let them grow in fresh water for about a week, you won't have to boil them as much and they lose much of their acridity (you may be able to eat them raw too). The younger and longer grown in clean water the better the results.

if you dry and grind it you can turn it into a starchy flour and make a water lily cake(like pancakes but worse),or into a shake and chug it. fresh lilly roots dont taste as bad as floating ones.i grew up eating this.

Love your videos :)

Did you try any small younger tubers? I was reading up on this and saw sources in other parts of the world saying the tubers get more bitter as they get larger.

I just found a huge lily today. I boiled it for ~20 minutes then took a potato masher to it and rinsed it off. I would say that I got 75-85% of the bitter flavour out! They’re almost Apple like now and I feel like they would go well in a baked crisp

love the wilderness living challenge by the way

this is awesome good form family good form

Just a thought but yes I wouldn't waste time on it. I have a couple ponds down here and if I try it I'll let you know how it turns out.

Awesome, I wanted to test this, too!

This waterlily is native meal to Maun in Botswana 🇧🇼. It is cooked with meat for many hours and it does taste good at the end....

What if you boiled it for a few hours? Will that make a difference?

I'd say try grating it and soak it in salt water over 2 nights while changing the water between then boil it and change the water twice.

In regards to the inability to eat more pike I was wondering why you didn't make a fruity sauce with the cherries and berries to cook with the pike instead of eating them by themselves? Just curious. Cheers.

But there are many different species of water lilies. What is some are better suited for human consumption than others?

Hello are able to send me the rhizome stem ? Like slots of them ?

Hello, we eat them all the time its very good stuff lilly roots soup.

ray mears has a video fermenting the flower seeds to try making them palatable, it did not work.

I freaking heard of a way to process this at one rare.moment of reading online. I can not for the life of me remember what it was but for some reason I have a feeling it was something like soak in lye water for 24, leach in moving water for 24 and then cook. I have to find that now cause I wanted to try it.

I wonder if you could do it up like a mash like a distiller mash and then drain it through a cheesecloth then serve it up like mashed potatoes?

You should have tried to slurp back some starch water from boil #2. Could be useful to augment a stew. :-)

That's an interesting point. The fact that some plant or animal matter is not poisonous and/or may have some nutrients in it doesn't actually mean that you can readily fill an empty stomach with it. Even under starvation, your body will quickly reject some new foods sources. I have a question though. Some foods aparently become better after some time if you keep on trying to eat them. In my case, beer and sushi were just awful at first, but i now find them extremely tasty. This effect has been widely observed and some terms have been coined in an attempt to explain it (such as "flavour flavour learning"). I suspect our brains may have a mechanism to change our perception of how tasty a food source is over time. Maybe the brain is reading the effect of nutrient level spikes in the blood minutes to hours after our meals and then linking these to those initially unapalatable tastes? Maybe the brain is just lessening the rejection to those foods because an initially presumed connection between those specific tastes and a possible poisoning was canceled through experimentation? Maybe the initial rejection is just a means for our body cells to have enougth time to develop a means to cancel actually poisonous substances found in different types of foods? Those are just theories anyway. Thanks for the experiment and your thoughts on it.

not sure why the same comment appeared twice, I was saying ray mears tried fermenting the seeds and it did not work either

My grandfather we are Native American and he said they ate them and it would taste like potatoes it could be different on each lake

these are eaten quite frequently as a tea or cooked with sweet honey in eastern asia. maybe the specimen may differ from here and at northern america tho

I liked the smile and the appearance that you were hoping your son would just grab a bite. So lily pads off the menu? lol You should try seasoning the pike with it! Shave some slices and boil then roast and grind them up and cook you pike with this as a seasoning. Or just grill it with butter and salt pepper and a sprinkling of honey, which ever. lol

check out the Indian Village. They peel the stem, break into segments, boil it with spices..... Its gross if you don't know how to do it.

I think the confusion is that everyone keeps trying the rhizome and not the roots themselves that attach the plant to the floor and feed the rhizome. ?

I had to give your family a thumbs up! They are the real taste testers. Mine won't eat MREs. Tell your wife thanks for sacrificing the smell of her house. Great job! You need to get them all fake beards to wear in your video... lol

For me, I found the best way to eat this was to grate it from raw into a pulp and put it in a net bag and I put it in the river to leach for 24 hrs as this was the most energy saving way, I then made them into patties with some wild garlic flowers heads and baked them on a hot stone until brown . I managed to eat 3 patties about 6 ounces with some pheasant, I suffered no ill effects but I think it was only pure hunger that I was able to suffer that amount.

Hey If you are up for another experiment with this root one I have been meaning to test is a technique used by Australian Aboriginals to make edible a poisonous yam found there. They roast the yams whole with the skin on until fully cooked and then slice up this and place into a reed bag they make. Here I would recommend mesh. and leave in a running stream overnight to leech out the toxins If this is a viable option it would remove much of the labor

In trying to figure out an edible recipe for water lily, one of the things that stands out is that nothing in nature eats them, even though they are clearly abundant and easy enough to collect. There must be some sort of antacid added to the cooking water to break down the high acidity of the tuber. . It might be that cooking in a large pot of water to which several packs of Alka-Seltzer has been added might work. LOL :-)

Do you know the channel "primitive technology"? The guy faced similar issues with edible but hardly palatable seeds. To process them, he cut the seeds in very slim slices - just the way you guys did. But then he left them in a woven basket in a spring for more than 24 hours to get the bitter compounds out. It had a similar effect like your cooking procedure. Perhaps that way the water lilly could become part of your survival diet.

Could you just extract the starches somehow?

It is not letting me reply to comments? Anyway tell Jeremy I said hey. I will be looking forward to your new videos.

well it contains some starch but you need to boil out all the poison

Try cooking it for 8 hours.. Over a fire. Something natives did was boiled food for many hours in a stew.

i think they boil taro root in lye....(maybe?)....try boiling in white wood ash

Have you tried stir-frying the stem with garlic and salt? It's delicious! 🍕🍎

You should make pemican and hard tac for next time. Or spam and rice to keep meat on your bones next time.

Interesting, you would think all that boiling and then baking would make it palatable, but it seemed even worse when you tried it.

Thank you for exposing "fake news" in the wild edibles world. Maybe you could start a new playlist debunking other edibles, tips, tools, etc. Throw the gauntlet down and challenge others to bring further evidence to prove you wrong. Now that would be some reality "TV" to watch 😮😆

try to smash it without boiling. and extract the starch.

Good test back to the pike for now lol

Interesting experiment! I don't think I would care for it!

Respect

Has anyone bagged a boon animal yet on season 3? I have not seen it that far yet. Winter has to have a major suck factor.

You try stems , stems are too testy but the stem under the flower try too tasy boil it and mix salt and try too tasty

had an accident with a flame and am regrowing it. Very sad day. but half way back.

I have the same results with water lilly. I prefer to eat the creatures that live off or around the lilly.

Only thing stopping me is the other weeds in the water, yikes!

Well, it wouldn't surprise me if it was wrong. Native Americans often applies the same name to multiple edible plants, & even had general category terms for certain types of food, the way we have fruit, vegetable, grain, etc. For instance, a lot of tribes in the east called all edible roots "to" or "ato." It's not like white people were trying every single one, or learning to gather it for themselves. They farmed virtually all of their food.

You shouldn't allow your child to experiment with eating foraged foods until you know for certain it is edible. If there are toxins in the plant, it will affect your child more than it would you because he's smaller.

I wonder if some politicians would benefit from successive boiling? Would they also become less offensive?

You dont eat water lily roots but you only eat the stems under the flower only, I know cause I'm from Bangladesh.

so apparently even with alot of prep work it's not worth the effort

I found motivation to dig up a pond lily thanks to the video! The best method I found was to boil thin slices in a little bit of full fat milk for 5 mins then eat with some honey. All the astringency is neutralised by the milk in that 5 minute boil even the now yellow milk is good to drink and the sugar in the honey offsets the bitterness making it a genuinely tasty snack. The water boiling method as in the video worked well when the slices were eaten with sugar. I don't have any berries but I wonder if the small amount of sugar and the acidity in the berries will offset the bitterness of the rhizome enough for it to become more palatable.

It really doesn't seem appealing but have you or will you try making them like mashed potatoes? Buttery goodness might help