There are several large silver maples in my yard, and right now they are dropping thousands of seeds. I was wondering if the seeds are edible. If so, what do they taste like? Can they be roasted like pumpkin seeds?
According to this site, with all its highly annoying pop-ups, the 3 varieties of maple native to British Columbia have seeds which are edible raw or roasted.
However, this is the only reference I could find in several pages of hits on search terms, and I frankly would have to be very very hungry before I would risk it, even if chipmunks, squirrels, and other animals eat the seeds just fine.
This search: edible “Acer saccharinum” turns up a number of hits that suggest that the cooked seeds are edible, and just as importantly, NO indication that the seeds might be toxic, except possibly to horses.
Having a Silver maple out back, I figured the quickest way to find out how the seeds taste was to eat a few. I collected six seeds from dried pods. Ate three raw, and three after cooking 1 minute in the microwave. The raw seeds had a bit of a split-pea planty flavor, not so good. The cooked and crunchy seeds had a slightly sweet, nutty (surprise!) flavor. They were quite tasty.
Without serious confirmation on the lack of toxicity of the seeds, that’s as far as I’m willing to go.
Mangetout will likely be along with a reference to a book called “edible seeds of the middle latitudes” or some such. Barring that, a trip to the local universities horticultural library might be in order.
Heh. I don’t recall anything in my books, but I’ll check tonight. I have wondered about this before; my gut feeling is that they will turn out to be edible, or ‘not inedible’ (I mean, it’s not as if we’re talking about a randomly-picked member of Leguminosae or anything here, which would make me exceptionally cautious) - other parts of maple plants are edible, but it may be that undesirable concentrations of something or other exist in the seeds as a defence mechanism.
I’ll post back tonight with any information I can glean.
Quick addendum: this site says they are edible raw or cooked, but you shouldn’t necessarily believe everything you see on the net.