My girlfriend and I have kind of a thing for perennial vegetables, and in particular Andean root crops, many of which seem to grow especially well in our mild-winter, cool-summer Mediterranean climate. Oca is one of these, and it’s said to be second only to the potato as a staple root crop of the central Andes.

About a year ago we bought two oca “starts” while shopping for plants. It’s kind of silly to sell oca “starts” like that because they’re just oca tubers stuck in some dirt, with no roots or leaves growing yet, but I suppose the dirt does protect the tubers from light and drying out. Of the two, one died (probably from neglect and lack of water), but the other one made a nice sized oca plant and when we dug it up recently there was a decent crop of oca tubers. We saved the little ones for propagation and boiled up the big ones to see how they tasted.

Taxonomy

Oca is in the wood-sorrel genus Oxalis, in a family with not too many well-known edible members (starfruit/carambola is one). It’s also in the same genus as Cape oxalis which is a horribly invasive weed around these parts. The plants (oca and Cape oxalis) look very similar to each other and oca was probably cultivated from a wild ancestor similar to Cape oxalis.

Source

Straight out of our garden in front of our apartment.

Method of Preparation

Since we’d never tried oca before we wanted to keep it very simple and taste the intrinsic flavor. So I just boiled them for 20 minutes and ground a little salt on them.

Review

Tasted pretty much like boiled potato with a subtle sour taste. I read a description somewhere that said oca tastes like a baked potato with the sour cream already added, and I must say that’s spot-on. The texture is nice, more like a waxy potato than a big starchy potato. As with any starchy tuber, it’s pretty boring when boiled and eaten plain, but there’s so much potential here. Oca fries, oca hash browns, scalloped oca…