Using Your Poppy Seeds These blue, beautiful poppy seeds are bursting with bold, nutty flavor and have dozens of popular applications. Poppy seeds add both flavor and texture to breads, cookies, muffins, cakes and other baked goods, and are sometimes added to hamburger and hot dog buns to give them a little crunch. Try adding a few pinches to other favorites like pancake batter or salad dressing. You can buy poppy seeds for uses outside of the kitchen, too. Their pleasing color and shape make them a popular additive to homemade bars of soap, in which they serve as a mild exfoliant. In Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India, these seeds are ground into a paste with fresh milk to create a revitalizing skin moisturizer. In Ukrainian cuisine, blue poppy seeds are a key ingredient in kutia, a sweet pudding and common first dish in traditional twelve-course Christmas Eve dinners. The seeds can be ground into a fine paste that is commonly used throughout Central and Eastern Europe. This paste is a filling in makowiec, a traditional Polish bread roll, and in hamantash, a traditional Jewish cookie served during Purim in some parts of Europe. Poppy Seed Nutrition Considering all the delicious applications that these seeds have, it can be easy to forget that they're good for you, too. A single poppy seed serving delivers 13% of the daily recommended value of calcium, and boosts your daily intake of Vitamin A, Vitamin C and iron, as well. Added to your bird seed mix, these seeds are also good for our feathered friends. Pouring bulk poppy seeds into your feeders without other seed can even soothe digestive and gastrointestinal issues in many wild birds.