How To Eat An Artichoke

Artichoke is a tasty and healthy vegetable, but many people avoid buying it because they simply don’t know how to cook an artichoke or how to eat it.  For instructions on cooking artichokes, see how to cook artichokes.  And keep reading this page to learn all you need to know how to eat an artichoke!

The first step of eating an artichoke is to take off the leaves.  You do it one leaf at a time – take off one leaf and eat it, then take off another one and eat it and keep going until there are no more artichoke leaves left.

So if you are wondering if you can eat the artichoke leaves, yes, you absolutely can!  The trick is to eat it in a special way I’ll show below.

Here’s the picture of the individual artichoke leaf:

Now take the artichoke leaf with your fingers.  Hold the leaf by its pointy end:

You can’t just put the whole leaf in your mouth and chew it – it will be yucky!  To eat an artichoke leaf correctly, you need to take off the juicy part of the leaf with your teeth and discard the rest.   Put the artichoke leaf in your mouth as shown on the picture below, then bite down with your front teeth and pull the leaf away from your mouth.  The edible part of the leaf will be in your mouth, and the rest of the leaf that’s in your hand can go in the trash.

As you take off and eat more artichoke leaves, the artichoke will be shrinking.  After all the leaves are eaten, you will see the core that looks like this:

Those hairs on the artichoke core are not edible.  Cut off the artichoke hair with a knife, and you will reveal the very tasty middle part of the artichoke, called an artichoke heart.  Here’s the picture of the artichoke heart:

To eat the artichoke heart, cut it in half, then bite into the soft grey part with your teeth and eat it.  Discard the artichoke stem.

Here’s the picture of an artichoke heart cut in half:

That’s all there is to eating an artichoke!  Now you know how to eat an artichoke, go ahead and buy it.  Don’t forget to check out how to cook an artichoke.

A popular thing to serve with an artichoke is a vegetable dip – my favorite is tzatziki yogurt dip.  Before you eat those leaves, first dip them in the sauce – yum!  Have fun eating that tasty and healthy artichoke!