Discovering Dining Room Tabletop Microgreens

red acre cabbage (top) and sprouting daikon radish microgreensIn my first few weeks in coronavirus lockdown in Philadelphia, I’ve discovered a crop that will become a fixture in my home cooking from now on: sprouting daikon radish microgreens. I’m now putting them in all kinds of things. Check out my three favorite creations so far: sprouting daikon chimichurri, sprouting daikon pesto, and sprouting daikon-pumpkin seed mole sauce.
I started growing sprouting daikon and several other microgreen varieties—including red acre cabbage, ruby red chard, garnet red amaranth, and a kale mix–in February in the idyllic confines of the Fairmount Park Horticultural Center greenhouse, where I landed a spot this year after a couple of years on a waiting list.

All of the microgreens flourished in the greenhouse—but we sadly had to evacuate in mid-March due to the pandemic. So I brought them all home, where they–thanks to the jumpstart they got in the greenhouse–continued to thrive on my dining room tabletop, and provide a continuous harvest for the next several weeks.

I brought home a small pot each of red acre cabbage and ruby red chard, densely planted for microgreen use. Even though they were ready for harvest when I brought them home in mid-March, they held up well in the pots for weeks without getting rangy, so I was able to harvest a few snips at a time to add to salads for weeks. I also brought a flat of garnet red amaranth microgreens back from the greenhouse, which made for visually striking additions to salads, soups, spring rolls, even deviled eggs (see below). They are so wispy that they don’t add much in the way of substance, in my estimation, but they are fun to have around for their looks.

The quick-growing daikon—which I got by mail order from Mountain Valley Seed Company—have been the real stand-outs in this new indoor environment. They are harvestable less than two weeks from planting, and hold for another week or two before they sprout a new set of leaves and start to get stringy. I’ve even grown a crop entirely inside my living quarters, on a tabletop that gets not much more than three hour of direct sunlight, in two weeks’ time.

But it’s not their growing properties that have been a revelation during my self-quarantine. It is their culinary versatility. They are great in salads—no surprise—and also sandwiches and wraps, and their Asian counterparts, spring rolls and sushi. You can toss a bunch in ramen, pho and other soups, as well as in stir fries. They also brighten up pesto, and are excellent in chimichurri, adding a piquant peppery element to the flavor profile. Best of all in my experiments so far, sprouting daikon radishes are superb in a green pumpkin seed mole.

SPROUTING DAIKON RECIPES: sprouting daikon chimichurri, pesto, and green mole sauce.