Small wonders: Why spring belongs to micro greens
THE DISH at ’Za in Arlington is beautiful: a small nest of sharp green sprouts, artfully placed next to the beet salad. At first, we think it a garnish and ignore it. It’s the updated answer to a parsley sprig, a nice color contrast next to the red of the beets and the white of the goat cheese. And then, bam — the flavor hits, sharp and spicy, packing more mustard than a jar of Grey Poupon.
From the first frost in mid-October until the last in mid-May, micro greens are our best hope for locally grown greens. Jorge Lopes, chef/owner of the Blue Room, is a micro green fanatic. “They pack the most amazing punch,” he says. “They give a plate eye appeal, for sure, but the flavor is so intense that you have to use them sparingly. Just a pinch on a plate does the trick.” Peter McCarthy of Evoo and ’Za would be lost without them. Yet most of us have no idea that they even exist.
“Spring starts here,” says Peter Lowy, assistant farm manager at Concord’s Verrill Farm. Lowy is standing inside the “high tunnel” green house, inspecting his micro greens, the first greens of spring. So far, there are 30 trays: purple radish, mustard, totsoi, kohlrabi, arugula, watercress, and red choi. On the first day of spring, the sprouts are two weeks old, with pinky-fingernail-sized leaves. Even at maturity, the plants are so tiny that Lowy and his assistant Jess Myles will harvest them with cuticle scissors.
Micro greens are a relatively new crop for venerable Verrill Farm. Lowy, who’s in charge of Verrill’s greenhouse operations, among other things, got the idea to try raising micro greens when he went to a farming conference a year ago. Another farmer had had a good experience with the greens; it seemed an easy way to extend New England’s skimpy growing season and give the public and the farmer something green and local to fill the gap between pumpkin and pea-tendril seasons.
Lowy kneels down to check the first buds of red choi, a pungent red-veined micro green he’s experimenting with this year. At the beginning of the season, Lowy and Myles harvest only 13 pounds of micro greens a week. That’s not a lot of greens. Even at the height of the season, the total yield is only 120 to 140 pounds weekly. Most of the micro greens grown by Verrill are sold to retail customers at their farm store. The rest go to Boston-area restaurants, including Mamma Maria, Rendezvous, Via Matta, Radius, Henrietta’s Table, Hamersley’s Bistro, Rialto, Evoo, the Blue Room, and Craigie Street Bistrot, all of which are run by chefs committed to supporting local farmers. Verrill isn’t a huge farm, and it doesn’t have a huge list of customers. According to Lowy, more chefs would like to buy his micro greens, but unless Verrill’s truck can deliver easily to a restaurant, they’re out of luck.
Until I visited Verrill, I confused micro greens with miniature or baby greens, an easy mistake. But there’s a big difference. The bright green teeny-tiny leaves of micro greens, so easily overlooked, are amazing flavor bombs. They start out just a little spunky; then, a few seconds later, the spiciness makes your palate tingle. You wouldn’t want to eat a whole salad of micro greens. Your mouth couldn’t take it.
Baby greens — palm-sized heads of spinach, arugula, Bibb, Mache, and romaine with thumb-sized leafs — are a whole different matter. You can get volume out of baby greens, enough to fill a whole salad plate, whereas micro greens usually can’t make it beyond the garnish stage. Micro greens are a perfect specialty crop: too labor-intensive to grow in bulk, too expensive to buy in bulk. Even for wholesale accounts like restaurants, Verrill has to charge $19 a pound for a bag of micro totsoi or micro purple radish sprouts. Even the busiest, best restaurant customers rarely order more than three or four pounds a week.
According to Lowy, raising and harvesting the crop is an extremely tricky and time-consuming process. “It’s a finicky set of plants,” he says. “They grow fast, but [they are] very sensitive to the amount of light, the moisture in the soil, the humidity in the green house. And here in Massachusetts, as everybody knows, the weather conditions are always changing.” Lowy also explains that the flavor changes radically based on the weather conditions — the hotter the temperature, the spicier the greens. “It’s like anything else that grows: the amount of sunlight and the temperature will affect the taste,” he says. “It’s why late-summer tomatoes are sweeter than early tomatoes, why crops like carrots and parsnips that are allowed to winter over taste ridiculously sweet.”
Other larger local farms also sell micro greens — Wilson Farms in Lexington is one — but Verrill has always cultivated relationships with chefs. “We don’t have a fancy million-dollar green house here with heating and electronic walls. Here in Concord, we are sort of low-tech, and we do everything by hand, here in the greenhouse, on our knees,” Lowy says. Myles agrees. At the height of the season, she spends almost half of her time tending the micro greens. She loves it, but it’s painstaking work. “You have to look at each plant closely, strip the first true leaf so precisely, and make sure that you don’t get any of the stem or pick up any soil or pearlite.” Then, by late May or early June, there will be pea tendrils. Soon after that, the strawberries and asparagus will start coming in. But this month belongs to the micro greens, sneaky little flavor bombs so easy to ignore. @
[Photo by David Winthrop]
Leave a Comment
(required)
(optional)
(required)
Most popular: