Watermelon seeds are the new superfood Londoners should be eating

Small but powerful, watermelon seeds have found favour with the capital's superfoodies, says Frankie McCoy
Pip, pip hooray
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Frankie McCoy5 September 2016

It's the classic fruit-based, late-summer calamity. You’ve got hold of a big chunk of juicy, refreshing watermelon — the most refreshing neon-pink fruit on the market — but you’ve got nowhere to spit the seeds. Nightmare.

But it turns out we should all stop all that because watermelon seeds are gearing up to take over from sunflower and pumpkin as the coolest kernels, for nibbling neat or sprinkling on your gluten-free muesli and organic hummus.

Watermelon juice company Mello has recently launched a range of watermelon seeds, roasted or chillified, to its range. Why? Because those black pellets are a nutritional powerhouse.

Just 100g of watermelon seeds contains a Dwayne Johnson-worthy 34g of protein — by comparison, sunflower seeds have 21g and pumpkin seeds a measly 19g. And naturally they have the standard seedy nutritional credentials when it comes to vitamin and mineral content: 100g has 130 per cent of your recommended daily amount of magnesium, 102 per cent of bone-strengthening phosphorus and 50 per cent of iron.

Mello co-founder Rose Aldean first started snaffling seeds on holiday while sampling the watermelon-rich cuisine of Iran. “I fell in love with them and couldn’t stop eating them while I was there, but when I got back to the UK I noticed that they weren’t available here,” she says. So she immediately set about adding them to the Mello range.

“People expect them to taste the same as when you eat them from the watermelon. But they don’t at all. Seeds straight from the watermelon are bitter and tough. We remove the black, bitter outer shell and roast the inside. They’re light and nutty with a smooth taste and, unlike other seeds and nuts, not heavy or oily.”

Although less crunchy than other seeds, they have a pleasant, popcorn-like taste — if you’re the kind of person who owns 15 types of nut butter and sprinkles chia on everything, they’ll be right up your clean-eating street.

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Even if your afternoon snackage is more Walkers than watermelon, you can still get in on the seed action. As part of its seasonal collection Crosstown Doughnuts has launched a watermelon-and-lime variety, topped with Mello seeds. Adding watermelon seeds to the top of a sugar-glazed ball of deep-fried dough isn’t about clean-eating; rather it’s an experiment with taste and texture, the bubblegum flavour of the soft icing contrasting with the salty crunch of the toasted seeds.

Although Mello is currently the only brand roasting up the rejected bits of watermelon for our pleasure, it probably won’t be long before every salad you eat comes coated with the crunchy little niblets. They’ve already been championed by health bloggers such as the Hemsley sisters and Clean Eating Alice.

Until they become more mainstream you can keep your passion for the seeds skin-deep: watermelon-seed oil is popping up on cosmetics counters as an anti-ageing wonder. It’s a dry oil that is not only absorbed quickly but is rich in linoleic acid — apparently great for lines and sagging. So if you want baby-bottom skin you’d better start swallowing those juicy, juicy seeds.

Follow Frankie McCoy on Twitter: @franklymccoy

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