21 vegetables containing the letter M — each with origin, classification, and notes.
Below are vegetables that contain the letter M anywhere in the name. Each of the 21 vegetables below opens to a full profile.
The edible young growth of bamboo plants — harvested as they emerge from the soil before the shoots harden into woody cane; a staple of East and Southeast Asian cooking, eaten fresh, tinned, or fermented.
A tropical vine vegetable with intensely bitter flesh — the most bitter of all commonly eaten vegetables; used across Asia and the Caribbean for its medicinal properties and its role as a flavour counterpoint to rich, fatty dishes.
A North American native bulb that was a major staple food for Plateau and Pacific Northwest indigenous peoples — slow-roasted in earth ovens to convert its complex carbohydrates into intensely sweet caramelized food.
A crisp, watery fruit (botanically) eaten as a vegetable — sliced fresh, pickled, or blended into cold soups, with cooling associations everywhere it grows.
The long pod of the moringa tree (also called moringa pods) — eaten across South Asian and African cuisines as a vegetable, while the leaves of the same tree are a renowned superfood.
A knobby, nutty tuber unrelated to artichokes and not from Jerusalem — a North American sunflower relative producing crisp, sweet roots eaten roasted, raw, or in soup.
A round, brown-skinned tuber with crisp, juicy white flesh, mildly sweet and starchy — eaten raw with chili-lime or chopped into salads, a Mexican market staple.
A tropical grass with an intensely citrus-lemony fragrance from its stalks — essential in Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Malaysian cooking; the bottom white section is finely sliced or pounded into pastes, while the whole stalk is used to infuse soups and curries.
The tenderest of salad leaves — small, velvety rosettes with a mild, nutty, slightly sweet flavour; a classic French winter salad green harvested when almost everything else in the garden has died back; sold as lamb's lettuce in Britain and corn salad in North America.
A vigorously spreading herb family that flavors everything from Moroccan tea to British roast lamb to Vietnamese spring rolls — with hundreds of varieties of distinctive cooling intensity.
A small green legume native to South Asia — dried mung beans cook quickly and are used in dals and porridges; sprouted they become bean sprouts; split yellow they make the silkiest dal; whole in Ayurvedic cooking they are considered the most easily digestible pulse.
The edible fruiting body of fungi (not technically a vegetable, but treated as one), with hundreds of cultivated and wild species ranging from mild button to umami-rich porcini.
A large orange winter squash native to the Americas, with sweet starchy flesh used in soups, pies, and seasonal lattes — and its seeds eaten as a snack.
A wild garlic-onion forest vegetable native to eastern North America — a brief spring season, intense aromatic flavor, and a passionate Appalachian foraging tradition that's gone viral with chef-driven demand.
The mathematically perfect vegetable — romanesco broccoli (or Roman cauliflower) forms a head of tightly packed, spiralling chartreuse-green florets that arrange themselves in a precise Fibonacci spiral; each smaller cone is a perfect miniature of the whole, making the vegetable a textbook example of a natural fractal; milder and nuttier in flavour than broccoli or cauliflower, it has become a favourite of chefs for its visual impact.
A pine-scented woody Mediterranean shrub that's beloved in roast meats, breads, and Mediterranean grilling — extraordinarily long-lived and traditionally associated with remembrance.
A distinctive sea vegetable with an intense salty, maritime flavour — marsh samphire (glasswort) is a bright green succulent harvested from tidal mudflats in summer, blanched briefly and served with butter and fish; rock samphire has a more pungent, aromatic taste and grows on coastal cliffs.
A small green papery-husked Mexican fruit-vegetable that's the foundation of salsa verde, mole verde, and the green chile cuisine of central Mexico — tart, citrus-like, distinctly different from a tomato despite the name.
A sweet-tart nightshade berry, botanically a fruit, treated culinarily as a vegetable, and the foundation of cuisines from Italy to Mexico.
A bright orange-yellow rhizome from a tropical Asian plant — fundamental to South Asian and Southeast Asian cuisine, the source of curry's golden color, and the focus of an enormous global "anti-inflammatory" supplement industry.
A starchy tuber from the genus Dioscorea, native to Africa and Asia, larger and drier than sweet potatoes — the actual yam, not the orange-fleshed American imposter.
Try vegetables that start with M, or end with M. Or browse the full vegetables index.