They're Small but Mighty: Microgreens
Channel: Richard Kennedy
Date: 2013-02-16

"Microgreens." It sounds like a made-up word, a term that 21st century technogeeks might have invented because they consider "seedlings" to be hopelessly outdated. But it no longer matters who coined the word because everyone in the food industry  ̶  including the U.S. Department of Agriculture  ̶  now talks about microgreens.  I should say everyone "raves" about microgreens. 

Advocates will tell you these little seedlings  ̶  harvested at a mere seven to 14 days after germination  ̶  pack more nutrients than they would if allowed to complete their growth. A recent USDA study found that leaves from almost all microgreens had four to six times more nutrients than the mature leaves of the same plant.

Conventional kitchen wisdom suggests that tiny greens like this should be used as garnishes to salads, sandwiches and soups   ̶  mainly for appearance. As I discovered last week, it's not about looks, it's about taste.  Moreover, salads, sandwiches and soups are just the beginning.  To investigate this phenomenon, I traveled three hours east from Short Hills, across Manhattan and out onto the far reaches of Long Island last week to visit Koppert Cress, a relatively new microgreen "farm" in Cutchogue, N.Y.

"Farm" is a bit of misnomer since Koppert Cress is, in fact, an enormous greenhouse operation where plants are grown in some sort of inert natural material in thousands of plastic trays placed on huge stainless-steel "benches" that can be moved throughout the facility on pristine steel rails. There's not a smidgen of dirt in sight. In fact, the Koppert Cress greenhouses abhor dirt and foreign materials of any kind.  It's the way the "farmers"  ̶  well, let's just call them managers  ̶  keep their "crops" free of disease and bacteria.

Accompanying me on this trip were my colleague, Patrick Cleary, a senior sous chef at Hilton Short Hills, and Kenneth Cospito, executive vice president of sales for Agri Exotic Trading, a Clifton, N.J., firm that supplies fruit, vegetables and herbs to Hilton Short Hills and many other hotels and restaurants in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.  (I'm glad we traveled last Thursday, because a couple of days later we could have been trapped in a blizzard.)

Our host was Nicolas Mazard, Koppert Cress director of sales & marketing and a native of France, who gave us a rare tour of his facility, which usually is off-limits to outsiders to protect the plants from disease and his company's proprietary equipment from prying eyes. He invited us to take photos and video footage of everything except those secret machines, which he said were made exclusively for his company and provided a competitive advantage.  Best of all, he encouraged us to taste his plants.

Nicolas told us Koppert Cress grows its seedlings in an all-natural substance that he wouldn't name. Suffice it to say the material looks something like off-white cotton. It is placed with seeds in plastic plant trays, very similar to the kind you might find at your neighborhood nursery. When the seedlings are ready for harvest, the staff simply boxes up the trays and ships them to customers  ̶  mostly chefs, like me, who work at high-end restaurants. Little to no fertilizer is used, and the plants are so clean they don't need to be washed before consumed, according to Nicolas.

The Koppert Cress literature lists 68 different seedling types from amaranth to arugula, broccoli to beets and carrots to cilantro. The company even grows edible pansies.

We all were fascinated by the fact that Nicolas and his partners invested what obviously must have been several million dollars to build an ultramodern facility to grow this relatively off-the-beaten-path food.  We asked ourselves, "Why?" The answer became apparent as soon as Nicolas began offering samples. These tiny little nothings not only are packed with nutritious stuff, they taste incredible. I have to choose my words carefully to avoid understating the case: They simply explode with flavor in your mouth.

Each microgreen offered a distinct taste, some familiar to vegetables  ̶  except much more intense  ̶  and some strangely like fruits and even cheese. Clearly, we had encountered plants from another planet, or perhaps plants from some mad scientist's laboratory that had been bred to yield unearthly flavor. As it turns out, the opposite is true.

Koppert Cress is growing native species of plants as they existed before botanists hybridized them to make them disease-resistant and able to travel hundreds of miles in trucks or railroad cards. The flavors that stunned us are heirloom varieties, just like the heirloom tomatoes that many of us have rediscovered in recent years.

Now that I know more about microgreens, they definitely will play a role in the new menus my staff and I are developing for The Dining Room, Hilton Short Hills' full-service restaurant which currently is being rebuilt from the wall studs out and is scheduled to open next week.