Poppy seeds have a pleasant nutty flavor and fragrance that makes them popular in baked goods and confections. Used whole, the tiny blue-black seeds are common in lemon poppy seed cakes and as a bagel topping; they can also be ground into poppy seed paste and used as a pastry filling.
The seeds have a high oil content, and the first cold pressing produces a mild, edible oil used for cooking and cosmetics. Second pressings yield an oil that, further processed, is used for artists’ paints.
The poppy plant (Papaver somniferum) is an annual with large white, pink or lilac flowers that is native to the Middle East. Its unripe seedpods are filled with a gummy latex, or sap, that contains a variety of alkaloids, the source of opium. When ripe, the seeds have no trace of these alkaloids. The familiar seeds are less than a millimeter long and weigh very little; a pound contains more than a half million seeds!
