A Side of Dirt with Your Salad Sir?

A while back, we told you about the latest culinary trend sweeping the nation’s restaurants – hay was being featured on the menu of some haute couture restaurants in the United States (and being offered for a pretty penny at that). Well, now a new trend has started to emerge which may make you feel like you’ve been transported to kindergarten or first grade. Some restaurants have decided that it’s high time their customers eat a mouthful of dirt.

Edible Dirt Emerges in Copenhagen

Now to be fair, we’re not talking about the same stuff you plant your petunias in, though it sure does look that way at times and it takes a bit of imagination to get over the shock of seeing the stuff served to you in a nice restaurant. However, at Noma in Copenhagen, that’s exactly what you’ll get. You get a flower pot filled with something you’d swear was dirt and it’s even got a whole radish (raw of course) planted inside the dirt for your enjoyment.

Now you may be asking yourself, how they are getting away with serving their patrons dirt. The answer is, they’re not. It just looks that way. In reality, Noma, like a number of other restaurants is crafting a kind of edible dirt which their customers can actually eat without feeling like they’ve been given a dare by the other kids in their 1^st grade class.

What’s Really in Edible Dirt?

It’s actually a ground up mixture of a variety of seeds and other foods designed to look like dirt. Nor are they the only ones trying this concept out. In Tel Aviv, chef Eldad Shem Tov of Shakuf offers his customers a plate of dirt made out of chickpeas. Even in this country, you can dig into a mouthful of dirt if you visit San Francisco and sit in Jennifer Puccio’s restaurant, Marlowe; the dirt is made from olives.

Now while all these ideas may seem positively bizarre to you at first, it does seem to be a trend that’s catching on and which some chefs are having fun with. After all, isn’t that one of the things people come to a restaurant for? To try new things – here they get to try something new while being reminded of their childhood.

Tags: edible dirt, exotic menu items