How Do You Eat Microgreens? Tastiest Ways to Enjoy Over 35 Microgreens with Food Pairing Ideas

How Do You Eat Microgreens? 

Microgreens were first used to garnish fancy restaurant plates by adding bright colors and interesting leaf shapes to dress up main courses or salads. Sometimes they were only used to fill space on a plate to make an expensive meal look bigger. 

But times have changed.

Now microgreens are being used not only for their colors and to add interest but because of their flavor and nutritional value. 

Now microgreens are not only eye candy for high-end restaurants but are part of a nutritional plan and flavor boost for everyday meals. More and more people are growing their own microgreens and using them every day as salad garnish, including them in dishes as replacement vegetables, and even making specialty recipes that only include microgreens.

In this article, I have included a table that lists over 35 different microgreens listing their flavor profiles, dishes that they can be included in, and what other food, vegetables, fruit, and meat that pair well with the microgreen.

How Do You Use Microgreens?

Microgreens can fill that bill if you want to step up your culinary game and add more fresh and nutritious food items to your meals. The ways are unlimited.

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Here are some ways microgreens can be incorporated into your meals and meal plans. The data table below contains many other uses for microgreens, not only what to include them in but what flavors they accent. 

Table 1: Microgreen Flavor Profiles & Food Pairing Ideas

Below is a table that contains over 35 different microgreen varieties listing their flavor profile, how to use them, and food pairing suggestions or ideas.

Below the table are some other suggestions including videoes with microgreen recipes. You can click the underlined microgreen to learn more about that microgreen and how to grow it.

I’m not a chef or have any professional culinary experience. Most of the pairing information is modified from Specialty Produce.

Microgreens as Garnishes

Not very imaginative, but still, a few colorful microgreens draped over perfectly cooked scallop does bring some benefit to the plate. We start eating with our eyes first.

Colorful or microgreens with interesting leaves are the best garnishes. Bull’s Blood Beets, Red Garnet Amaranth, Ruby Red Swiss Chard, and microgreens like Shungiku and Lovage are excellent garnish microgreens.

Salads – Both as Accent or Whole

All microgreens can and should be included in salads, either incorporated in the salad or making up all the salad.  

Besides color and texture, microgreens are also very flavorful and bring a lot to the party. Not only do they look good and taste good, but microgreens are very nutritious and will add vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients, providing health benefits when used regularly.

Microgreens as Toppings

This is how I use microgreens the most. Well, I do add them in the cooking process quite often too. Still, I’d say the biggest share of microgreens I use are toppings on sandwiches, subs, burgers, tacos, nachos, in burritos, over chili, and cold salads like potato and macaroni salads.

Maybe this is more of a garnish, but I’m going to include it as a topping, but I sprinkle chopped microgreens over my pasta dishes, soups, roasts, and mashed potatoes after serving. It makes the meal look and tastes better!

Almost any microgreen can be used this way, especially crunchy microgreens such as cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, stronger flavored microgreens like radishes and mustard, and all of the herbaceous microgreens. 

Microgreens as a Side Dish

Microgreens can be used as a fresh vegetable side dish. Usually, not alone. Instead, add some pickled beets or peppers on top. Or maybe some sliced fruit like pears, apples, grapefruit, or citrus wedges.

Almost any microgreen will work as a side dish, from visually stunning purple Vienna kohlrabi, red acre cabbage, or unique tasting microgreens like lovage or chervil.

Incorporating Microgreens into Cooking

Most microgreens are delicate and do not hold up well to sustained heat. So when cooking with microgreens, they are added right before serving. 

There are a few exceptions I make to this. For instance, I add celery microgreens to my Thanksgiving stuffing or dressing (depending on where you are from). When I first saute the onions, I add chopped stalked celery to onions, but adding coarsely chopped celery microgreens into the mix before cooking adds a ton of celery flavor.

Onion and leek are other microgreens that can be added to and even mixed with food as it cooks. They have a surprising amount of flavor that is passed into the food as it cooks. 

Bok choy (or any of the mustards) is another microgreen that I add to stir-fries at the end before serving. It improves the flavor profile of the dish. Sometimes, instead of adding the bok choy to the dish when cooking, I chop it and sprinkle it on top of the rice before topping it with the vegetables, meat, and sauce. The temperature of the sauce extracts and spreads the flavor of the microgreens making the dish taste more fresh.

There are many more ways to use fresh microgreens in cooking, but let’s move on to a few more interesting ways to use microgreens.

Making Pesto with Microgreens

Many microgreens can be used to make pesto. You can use radishes or sunflowers besides the standard basil or arugula mixture.

Sunflower Pesto

Radish Pesto

I wouldn’t use radish leaves (yuck) but radish microgreens.

Adding Microgreens to Fruit Smoothies

Another great use of microgreens to increase nutritional intake is to add them to fruit in a blender and make a smoothie. 

I think microgreens such as cantaloupe and borage would make great additions because their flavor profile is fruity, to begin with. Spinach would work well too.

This one looks good.

Microgreens as Green Smoothies

Yep, microgreens can be used by themselves to make a smoothie. Sunflowers, wheat grass, and any mild-flavored microgreen will work.

Juicing Microgreens

I’m not brave enough unless there is a lot of fruit, but people like green juice, and using microgreens such as pea shoots, broccoli, wheatgrass, and kale microgreens will work. 

There Are Many More Ways to Use Microgreens

I hope this has answered your question about how do you eat microgreens.

You can treat microgreens almost like any other green and, in many cases, like you would use any vegetable for food preparations. The only exception is high sustained heat will break most microgreens down, and the way to get around that is to add them right before serving.

Microgreen Recipes

You can use the link below to take you to all of the microgreen recipes I have on Home Microgreens. I will continue to add more, but I’d like to ask you to share your favorite microgreens recipes with me.

I am always looking to add more recipes so if you’d like to share or better yet write up a little article or video that I can post on Home Microgreens that would great!

Click here to see the recipes on Home Microgreens

Are You Ready to Grow Your Own Microgreens?

The Home Microgreen Store has everything you need to start growing microgreens at home! Check it out.

Credits: Any Stock Photos come from: depositphotos.com or My View From The Woods.