Challenge the taste buds with some specialty salad leaf recipes.
One of the most fascinating food classes I ever went to was taken by Glynn Christian. Glynn is an ex-pat New Zealander who made his life in England, pioneering food television and writing some of the most informative food reference books I have.
The premise of the class I attendedwas about how we taste and build flavours in food. While the details of the course are too technical for this page, the gist is we experience taste through the thousands of tiny taste buds in our mouths. Messages get sent to the brain through sensory nerves to inform you of what you are tasting. Our taste buds recognise four basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. Everyone's tastes are different and as we age these change due to the diminishing sensitivity of our taste buds.
Different food cultures favour different taste sensations - think of those hyper-sweet Indian desserts or those ultra-sour Chinese pickles. We learn to enjoy the flavours from our own cuisine by tasting them from birth. But this doesn't mean we can't learn to enjoy other sensations by re-educating our palate.
In New Zealand we tend to ignore bitter salad leaves. I predict that this will change as we start to grow more specialty leaves in our gardens and become interested in using greens that are not mass produced for the supermarket. Attached to this story are a few recipes that make use of those leafy greens. Try them out!
1 Take a couple of handfuls of rocket. Separate the leaves from 3 witlof bulbs and arrange on a platter. Shred 30 mint leaves and sprinkle across.
2 Slice an avocado into thin slices.
3 Peel two mangoes and a quarter of a paw paw. Slice these into strips.
4 Place these across the plate of leaves and dress with a vinaigrette of olive oil, fresh lime juice and salt and pepper. Looks and tastes like summer.
