What Do Microgreens Taste Like? Five Ways Your Taste Buds Perceive Microgreen Flavors!
I wanted to dive in to helping our customers learn what microgreens go best with what meals and drinks. My meal time prowess is less than stellar, but a few years ago I stumbled upon a video that compared flavor to color. Sort of like a few primary colors can make any color under the rainbow, only with flavor instead. The video intrigued me!
Fast forward to present-day and I thought, well I'll do an internet search for “flavor wheel.” Wow! Mind. Blown. Talk about overwhelming!
Long story short, it hit me that we just need something basic... low and behold... the most basic of flavors are exactly what the gentleman in the video was talking about years ago.
Instead of focusing on super complicated flavor wheels, let’s talk about what we can taste instead! Then we'll relate those tastes to microgreens, okay?! And, by the way, everything in this post is my opinion... because many arguments revolve around the "science" of taste!
From what I've gathered, we only have so many taste receptors in our mouths, and each person's sensitivity to taste is unique—some people are super sensitive to certain tastes, and some aren't. You may be anywhere in between on the sliding scale of taste sensitivity!
All five flavors your tongue can taste—and more!—are represented in Back Mountain Microgreens’ array of microgreen products! Drumroll, please! Here are the five tastes we perceive: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. What's umami? Read on to find out!
You may also be wondering, what about spice? Rest assured, all you have to do is keep reading to pair microgreens like a pro with your favorite meals and drinks—at home in the kitchen, or at work in a gourmet restaurant.
By the end of this post, you'll be ready to up your culinary game and use the varied tastes of flavorful microgreens to complement any recipe because you'll know what microgreens taste like and how those flavors fit into your favorite meals!
Microgreen Flavors and Your Palette
Salty Tasting Microgreens
So, right off the bat, we don't sell, nor are we familiar with, microgreens that taste salty all by themselves. With that out of the way, a few weeks ago we shared a blog post on preserving microgreens. You know, for when you end up with extra microgreens and there's no sandwich or soup around to toss them on or in!
In the Waste Not, Want Not: Why and How To Preserve Microgreens post, we talk about dehydrating microgreens to preserve them—to hang on to their value long-term in a way that's more shelf-stable than fresh, cut produce that needs to be refrigerated. The great thing about dehydrating microgreens is that once they're dried, it's easy to mix them with salt to make your own seasoning blends.
Now, instead of just sprinkling salt over your meals... try adding some dried microgreens to your salt shaker, and see what you can come up with! The possibilities are endless!
Creating your own seasoning blends using your favorite sea salt and dehydrated microgreens is a great option that offers tons of flavor profiles because let’s face it... just about everything tastes better with salt and you can pick and choose to add in any microgreens you like!
Sweet Tasting Microgreens
Sweet tastes go well with just about every other flavor! Who doesn't love a good sweet and sour sauce, or sea salt sprinkled over homemade chocolate bars, and even though spice isn't a taste, per se—more on that later!—sweet tastes go great with spicy flavors too!
Oh, and umami (in my opinion—savory)! Who doesn't love a good meat glazed with a fruity sauce—like ham in cherry sauce?
You can't go wrong with sweet-tasting microgreens because they go well with nearly every meal. And, it's not just meals that are suited well with sweet microgreens.
Sweet greens are also great paired with drinks—think smoothies, cocktails, juices, etc.!
Looking for sweet microgreens like Mustard, Pea, Corn, Cantaloupe, Rainbow Swiss Chard, or Amaranth to name a few? Click the image above to check out our sweet microgreen assortment!
Sour and Bitter Tasting Microgreens
Even though sour and bitter tastes differ, they're grouped together because they're on different ends of the same scale! The function behind sour and bitter-tasting flavors is the PH.
Sour tastes have a low PH and are acidic—think lemons, limes, oranges, etc. These sorts of sour and tangy flavors go well in things like dressings and marinades and are often used as a tool to enhance other flavors—like when using lemon juice to preserve fish or fruit, or vinegar to activate baking powder or baking soda.
Check out our sour-tasting microgreens like Large Leaf Sorrel and Red Veined Sorrel here, and check back for next week's blog post for an awesome shrimp scampi-esque recipe that uses Back Mountain Microgreens lemony Large Leaf Sorrel, along with lemon juice, as one of the main flavors and active ingredients in the dish! We just took the photos and ate the final product yesterday... trust me, you don't want to miss this!
Bitter tastes have a high PH and are basic—think cranberries, black coffee, dry wine, etc. These sorts of bitter flavors are also used as a tool to enhance other flavors only instead of as active ingredients, they're more a tool to rein in other flavors that get out of control. Working something up that's too sweet, or too umami (aka fatty, in my opinion… more on this later!)? If so, add something bitter and the problem may be solved, or at least, be a bit less of a problem.
Bitterness is complex, and my skill at using this taste to create "Layered" and "Nuanced" flavors is sorely lacking! So, if you'd like to learn more about bitter tastes and how to use them, check out this helpful write-up.
You can also browse our bitter-tasting microgreens, like Broccoli, here.
Umami, or Savory Tasting Microgreens
Umami is the official name of the fifth taste our tongues can sense. That said, when I search for the word umami online, the word savory appears over and over again.
In my mind, savory (umami) is meaty... fatty... hearty! I say that for a couple of reasons. First, if we created a microgreens category for "Umami" products the majority of our customers would not know what sort of taste those microgreens offer! Second, to bring to light that the ability of our tongues to taste fat is a highly contentious topic! For me, fat has a very unique flavor and texture, but "science" still hasn't recognized that we have taste receptors specifically for fat. So, for the greater good of microgreens, we've got a product category called "Savory."
Savory-tasting microgreens represent products that are picked up by umami taste receptors, and are what we'd describe as meaty, satisfying, and hearty... as much so as baby vegetables can be! Instead of trying to use umami, or savory microgreens, to create dishes with this taste, it's more likely you'd add savory microgreens to dishes that already have a savory flavor or taste. Think meat and fat!
Here’s a post that talks about Microgreen Sunflower Shoots Over Grilled Sea Bass... WOW!
Check out our selection of umami, or savory-tasting microgreens, like Sunflower and Amaranth by clicking the image above.
Spicy Tasting Microgreens
It would be easy to consider spicy a flavor—but really, it's not! Our perception of spice on our tongues is a measurement of pain. And, some of us enjoy more spicy pain than others!
That said, how could we talk about what microgreens taste like without including spiciness?!
The spice of some Back Mountain Microgreens often surprises microgreen newbies! We've seen eventgoers experience the amazement for themselves, and express just how shocking it is that these tiny greens pack such a punch!
Depending on whether you enjoy spice in your meals (and/or drinks?!), makes adding spicy greens to your menu a personal decision. The good news is, you really can't go wrong because just like sweet microgreens, spicy microgreens go well with all the other flavors your taste buds can detect; salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami (or savory).
Check out our spicy microgreens, like Mustard and Radish, by clicking on the image above!
We hope you enjoyed this quick dip in the shallow end of the vast pool of microgreen flavors and tastes because the health benefits of microgreens aren't all they have to offer! Eye appeal, and even more importantly... flavor... are among microgreens' numerous benefits!
Sometimes unfamiliarity with something new, like microgreens, stops us from incorporating these tiny tasty veggies into our at-home or at-work creativity in the kitchen.
The point of this post is to help you up your culinary game with tasty, flavorful microgreens that you can easily use to complement any of your favorite meals now that you know what microgreens taste like and where those tastes work well with your recipes!
Knowing how our tongues perceive taste and what a few of our specific microgreen products taste like is a confidence boost! Now is the time to take this new knowledge into the kitchen!
Ready to give microgreens a shot? Use the links throughout the above text to hone in on specific microgreen tastes, or sign up for a subscription below to ensure farm-fresh microgreens are delivered straight to your door!
Orders received by Sunday at midnight will get your seeds growing in this coming week's batch!
