Culinary Assessment of Self-Produced Microgreens as Basic Ingredients in Sweet and Savory Dishes

Microgreens is a marketing term used to describe young and tender edible seedlings. In this work, a new culinary concept was developed to stimulate the culinary use of self-produced microgreens as basic ingredients of sweet and savory dishes. The production of microgreens in a soilless growing system was considered as a preliminary part of the culinary process for the dishes' preparation. In order to obtain customized microgreens for the culinary assessment, three different species were self-produced. As a result of the pilot consumer test, all species of microgreens resulted acceptable. A gastronomic session was also applied to develop some dishes using microgreens in the recipe. The culinary promotion of self-produced microgreens not only as garnishing greens may offer to the international gastronomy new ingredients and support the exploitation of local varieties and wild edible plants.