Cover the leaves with boiling water and cook for about 10 minutes until the leaves are tender. Once cooked, the leaves are ready to add to your recipe.
Popular Features: Cooking Videos. Join now! Sign In. View Cart. Chaya leaves. Quick Find:. What are Chaya leaves? Cooking With Chaya You can add the chaya leaves to soups, stews and a variety of egg dishes. Substitute for Chaya leaves If you have a recipe that calls for chaya leaves but you can't find them then either of these alternatives will work well: Common spinach leaves.
These are a good substitute for chaya if it's just being eaten as a vegetable. Green chard leaves can be substituted for either a vegetable or it also makes a good wrap. The leaves do require cooking. Where To Buy Chaya Leaves? The butterflies, birds and honey bees love it. Not to mention give good amount of food to the honey bees that are struggling to survive now a days.
I recommend getting one! Oh, by the way, I live in central Florida on the gulf. Grows great here. I absolutely love eating Chaya. I boil it for 20mins then put it in an iron skillet with bacon grease, garlic and salt. It tastes great and all my kids eat it too. We have been eating over the past year, after I read this article and did some more research to make sure. The freeze did kill all the leaves but now it has tons of deep green leaves. I just ate a plate of it today for lunch!
I know this is an old post on chaya, but it is still relevant. It is a non-profit recognized for their work with addressing world hunger.
They have a demonstration farm in Fort Myers, Florida and provide a wealth of information on plants and seeds. Oh, yeah! They offer many of these plants for sale and you can tour the demonstration farm and see all of the amazing plants. Don, yes it certainly is still relevant. Thanks for the info. I live in Collier County and will definitely check it out! I moved down to the Yucatan for about a year and when I found out the age of this one man, who was forty with a wife and two children, I asked him what was his secret for looking like he was maybe twenty.
He quickly replied the Chaya Tree. He said they all referred to it like the fountain of youth, only from a tree. Where I was located was surrounded by forest and I think it must grow wild there. He did not show me the tree but brought me a dish to eat which his mother had prepared. Even after cooking it down, it was still bright green. It was better than any dark green leafy vegetable I have ever eaten and I love spinach.
It does not have any similar taste to collard greens or turnip Greeks, or even spinach. Very mild and very good. He was quite protective of the trees as he did not show me where they were located.
It is wonderful to eat. As to whether it retains a youthful appearance to those who eat it regularly in their diet, I do not know. I do know he did not look anywhere near his age though. And after researching all the nutrients in it, I would think it certainly would not age a person. I want to harvest it and freeze the juice from the plant. Cook the leaves, drain, then blend the leaves but not any of the cooking juice. It has tons of nutrients in it.
I use it all the time in smoothies, soups anything I would add water to for additional nutrition. According to what I have read, is that through the cooking process all of the cyanide is removed from the juice. Hi, I live in Trinidad. My aunt gve me a small piece of Chaya stem and told me it is for diabetes. I dehydrate the leaves and blead them to be used in herbal medicinc for diabetes.
After having this magnificent plant for over three years, I finally found out the name today December 28th, I an greteful for all the information on Chaya. Anton R. I ate this for the first time tonight and it was quite good. And as others have said, it grows beautifully without any attention. I started mine from 3 sticks I rescued from a yard-waste pile. I live in Central Florida. I got a Chaya sprig as a gift in an order that was late.
A few weeks later, I put in in the garden. The instructions were: In soil, not water. It is living just on the natural rain and sprinklers and it is not the stinging kind. Once it gets big enough, I will send anyone cuttings for the price of shipping. Thanks for all the input, the great info and language lesson and… the recipes. I think that it must be similar to milkweed with its milky stems.
I am staying in the Yucatan. I found Chaya juice here. I wonder if I can share a picture? I saw someone drinking the thick bright green glassful. I think it is more yummy than the other greens. It tastes fresh squeezed. I am curious why it tastes so fresh squeezed. I hope I am not getting cyanide in a dangerous amount. Almost every restaurant has some for very cheap, compared to a fresh squeezed vegetable juice in NYC. I think I will miss Chaya the most when I leave the Yucatan!
I am glad to know more about Chaya because I love it. I have been an NP for decades; the closest I have found for fountain of youth ingredients, is nitric oxide. Blueberries are at the top of lists I have seen for nitric acid. I have been drinking the water veggies were cooked in for decades. Supposedly, most of the vitamins are in the water, but it probably depends on factors such as cooking times.
Boiling does not fix most water problems. For diabetes, I recommend common sense by preventing high blood sugars. There is more research all the time from many angles.
Thank you to all the people supporting butterflies and bees! Northern species. Chaya was my first real tropical psuedo wild edible. Here in Miami I tried to worship Chaya in the sense that I used it as cooked green in all recipes suitable for greens. I was excited to have a perennial highly nutritious edible green that is indestructible, just lay a stick on the ground and it grows roots!
Now the upshot. Both varieties! Yet NO discomfort at all eating it after cooked. Latex milky sap very irritating!!! When combined with stinging hairs oh my, misery! Even though it still grows in the yard, I gave up on eating Chaya and I have not had any more Kidney stone issues since a year now.
This attempt a perennial greens has failed miserably. I hate Chaya with a passion now as it seemed to hate me even though I revered it. So much for communication with plants. It is interesting how much some of Chaya varieties look like a Papaya! They both have hollow type stems and grow quickly.
They must be related. Both itch me, papaya sap too. And I like to eat papaya. But so far papaya has not given me a kidney stone, but if I ate Papaya leaves cooked I might huh?
As soon as I touched that mean plant it had stinging spines that penetrated my hand leaving itchy welts for a week! Chaya, the Mayans can have it! When I was living in Mexico, down close to the border of Belize Mayan area , I met a man there and thought he was perhaps 19 or 20 years of age. One day he said something about his children.
I asked him how old he was and he said I was taken back with shock. I know you have to cook the Chaya for 20 minutes or it is poisonous. Perhaps you did not cook it long enough and had a bad reaction. I purchased three stalks over the Internet and was sent those three stalks wrapped in a wet paper towel and put in an open baggie. They grew into trees. I found that waiting about a year to eat it will give you more tender leaves to eat. But I realized the branches or stalks leading from the main tree to the leaves were what I was sent to grow the trees.
I have also heard you can live off of three tablespoons of Chia a day if necessary and can survive. Do you know if that information is correct? Thanks for the info and hope the 20 minutes of cooking helps and a pair of gloves for picking it will help you because it is so nutritious. Andrea where did you get your information in regards to eating it raw?
We have been eating it blended in smoothies on and off for a few years now. My husband has type 2 diabetes and it always brings his sugar levels right down. Somewhere along the line we were told just to soak in vinegar for minutes to neutralize the toxins. Which we have been doing. My concern it is a silent toxin that builds up over time and then its to late. I really prefer the raw version as with all veggies raw is best.
Oops, I did not realize your postings start with the oldest posts with newest at the very bottom? Thanks for your time…. I love Chaya and have eaten for a couple years. After I cook it I chop it up with scissors and then freeze a couple tablespoons in each cup of muffin pan then put all little mounds in ziplock bag.
I add one mound to a smoothie along with neem leaves and everything healthy I can get my hands on. It has brought my asthma under a lot better control. I even add it to meat loaf,chili, soup, omlets, you name it.
At 71 few can keep up with my husband and I. Happy eating. Chaya Soup is now my favorite. You cook the Chaya in the soup and there is no problem. I am wanting some Chaya seeds. I was born in Belize an we ate it all the time, I am into herbal medicines am wanting some seeds to grow my own. I give it 5 minutes at a rolling boil, drain it off, add fresh water and season at that time, and boil another 3 minutes.
I am not scared of hydrocyanides, just sensible. I eat my apple cores, seeds and all, they also have hydrocyanides. I would not eat a cake of pressed apple seeds, however. What you start in the pot is what you serve after cooking. I have not consumed them yet but had a few branches get bent over from Hurricane Matthew, so, I am going to give it a try tonight. First I will boil the cut up leaves and then I will stir fry and combine with some Forbidden Rice.
I will let you know if I survive:. Hi Margaret. I am in Zimbabwe I am looking for chaya plants. Pls contact me on shandushine gmail. I would be grateful and generous thru paypal if anyone can send seeds to Australia.
If you live in Australia, you know very well that is not going to happen as seeds cannot be sent through the mail. Chaya can survive anywhere. I think there may be some varieties that are especially, er, consumer-friendly, for lack of a better term. It seems that many a critter can quite easily stomach at least the kind growing around my house — especially whiteflies. I have what I was told was Chaya I bought in Sarasota last year.
It was a small tree in a pot and I planted the tree in the ground. It barely has grown over that year and the leaves are very sparse only on the top few inches of every branch. Is this normal? During a heavy storm a few weeks ago, the tree fell over due to the height and shallow rootedness of this tree.
I did take a stem cutting and planted it at that time. I stripped all of the leaves off and within 2 weeks there was new leaf growth and now weeks after planted the leaves are full sized and I think it grew a few inches already. I tilled the soil where I planted the stub and it is doing well. Still a little afraid of eating the leaves knowing it contains cyanide.
Learned about it at ECHOnet. We live in central florida and have it growing in a multiple areas. Chaya was introduced into Cuba, and from there into Florida. In south Florida it is often found as a rank shrub, but seldom is appreciated for its food value as a vegetable. Chaya is a large leafy shrub reaching a height of about 6 to 8 feet. It somewhat resembles a vigorous hibiscus plant or the cassava plant. The dark green leaves are alternate, simple, slick surfaced with some hairs, and palmately lobed much like the leaves of okra.
Each leaf is 6 to 8 inches across and is borne on a long slender petiole leaf stem. Where the leaf stem connects to the leaf, the leaf veins are fleshy and cuplike. Chaya blooms frequently, and both male and female flowers are borne together at the end of long flower stems. Both kinds of flowers are small, less than 10 mm long. The white male flowers are much more abundant.
In the fall trials at Gainesville, FL, seed pods about 1-inch wide and the size of walnuts were produced. These were similar to those on cassava. The wood of young stems is soft, easily broken, and susceptible to rot.
When cut, the stem exudes a white latex.
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