Amaranth is an ancient pseudocereal, the seed of an herbaceous plant rather than a true grass grain, cultivated for thousands of years by Aztec and other Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations of the Americas.
The seeds are cooked and eaten like a grain (similar to quinoa or rice), ground into gluten-free flour for baking, or popped like popcorn for a crunchy topping; the plant's leaves are also cooked as a leafy green, much like spinach. Amaranth has a nutty, earthy, slightly peppery flavor and appears in Mesoamerican dishes such as alegría (a popped-amaranth candy) and tamales, in Indian cuisine as rajgira flour, and increasingly in gluten-free baking and granola in the US and Europe.