Eight Ways to Eat Sunflower Microgreens

Sunflower shoots are the one microgreen you can build a dish around rather than sprinkle on top. They are mild, thick-stemmed and sturdy enough to sit in a dressing without collapsing, which puts them somewhere between a herb and a salad leaf in how you use them. Here is the full range, from no cooking at all to a wok.

No cooking

• Straight salad: sunflower shoots as the entire leaf component, dressed with lime, fish sauce and a little sugar. They have enough body to carry a sharp dressing.
• Avocado toast: a thick handful rather than a pinch — there is a full recipe for this on the blog.
• Yam-style salad: tossed with prawns, shallot, mint and chilli, treating the shoots the way you would treat raw vegetables in a yam.
• Smoothies: a handful blended into banana and yoghurt adds a nutty note and disappears entirely in colour.

Assembled warm

• On rice: piled onto hot rice with a fried egg and a spoon of chilli oil. The heat from the rice wilts them just enough.
• In noodle soup: added to the bowl after the broth, never boiled in it — they need the heat to pass through them, not to cook them.
• In a sandwich or banh mi: instead of lettuce, where their stems hold up against sauce far better.

Actually cooked

• Garlic stir-fry: under a minute in a very hot wok, the closest thing to pad pak bung — there is a full recipe for this one too.

What not to do with them

Don't boil them, don't put them under a grill, and don't dress a salad more than a few minutes before it goes on the table. All three end in the same place: a limp, grey-green pile that tastes faintly of the fridge. Everything good about sunflower shoots is texture, and texture is the first thing to go.