Poppy seeds lend themselves to a variety of dishes, from pickles and kormas to cakes, bagels, and buns. The blue-grey seeds are used in central and eastern European and Middle Eastern cuisines, and the creamy-yellow seeds are used in Asian cooking.
Poppy seeds are rich in linoleic acid, which makes the taste buds more sensitive to pleasant sweet, salty, and savoury tastes, while dampening down bitterness. The seeds are also packed with green and grassy aldehyde flavour compounds, in particular 2-pentylfuran and hexanal. Other important flavour compounds include balsamic vinyl amyl ketone, and citrusy limonene.
