Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Typically and historically, ginseng has been sold as a dried root and it is dried to the
point where it weighs maybe one third to maybe one fourth of what it weighed when it was
freshly harvested. So if you harvest, let's say three pounds of fresh ginseng root, by
the time that root is properly dried it will way perhaps one pound. You have to be careful
when drying ginseng roots too, because you don't want to cook the root. You don't want
to bake it. Ginseng is almost always slowly air-dried at temperatures that never exceed
90-95 degrees and it takes usually about two weeks to dry ginseng roots properly under
those types of conditions with good air circulation. You can very quickly ruin ginseng by drying
it in an oven or something like that. Even a dehydrator...a food dehydrator that has
temperatures that are over, let's say 90 or 95 degrees could very quickly ruin ginseng
by over-drying it. And generally it's between 3 and 3.5 to 1, the ratio of freshly harvested
root to dried root. Ginseng roots that are dried are very very brittle. If they're properly
harvested they have a lot of fine root hairs which break off. Typically everything is saved.
Nothing is wasted. Typically those broken root hairs are ground up into powder and that
powder is made into teas, quite often it's packaged in tea bags. In some cases, it's
put into capsules for people like myself who don't like to chew on bitter-tasting roots.
Traditionally though, ginseng roots are put in ceramic vessels and simmered for a long
period of time, made into a tea and then that beverage is consumed. That's the more typical,
traditional way that Chinese ginseng would be consumed. You might wonder why there's
no ginseng teas that made from the ginseng leaves and the reason for that is because
of the amount of pesticides that are applied on a routine basis. So, any product that is
sold for human consumption has to have tolerances established for pesticides and ginseng leaves
that are coming from commercially grown ginseng are going to have lots of pesticides on them
and probably not be suitable for teas. It's often been wondered whether ginseng leaves
have the same health properties as ginseng roots and if you believe that the active ingredients
in ginseng are these class of compounds called ginsenosides, well, it turns out that the
leaves do have significant quantities of these active ingredients called ginsenosides. So
ginseng leaves indeed do contain many of the same constituents that are found in the root.
The concentrations, the ratios and the percentages of these various types of ginsenocides may
vary but indeed, the leaves to contain the same good stuff that we think is what gives
ginseng root its activity.