 <p>I had a similar issue and digged quite deep into the polymer code - it seems like there is no way for doing this. I found a quite dirty workaround, using an invisible item, but maybe it helps for you :</p> <pre><code> &lt;paper-dropdown-menu label="List's Color Tag" id="colorTag"&gt; &lt;paper-menu class="dropdown-content"&gt; &lt;paper-item style="display:none"&gt;&lt;/paper-item&gt; {{#each colors}} &lt;paper-item&gt;{{.}}&lt;/paper-item&gt; {{/each}} &lt;/paper-menu&gt; &lt;/paper-dropdown-menu&gt; </code></pre> <p>Than you should be able to set it to display nothing as selected by calling</p> <pre><code>document.getElementById('colorTag').contentElement.selected = 0; </code></pre> <p>I hope it works for you, it is not tested completely as I don't use Meteor and I use special IDs. I have set the invisible item to have the ID -1, so it does not mess with my other IDs. </p> <p>So in my case it looks like this :</p> <pre><code>&lt;paper-dropdown-menu id="carSelector" label="[[label]]" attr-for-selected="car-id" selected="{{selectedId}}" always-float-label &gt; &lt;paper-menu attr-for-selected="car-id" selected="{{selectedId}}" class="dropdown-content"&gt; &lt;paper-item car-id="-1" style="display:none"&gt;&lt;/paper-item&gt; &lt;template is="dom-repeat" items="[[cars]]" as="c"&gt; &lt;paper-item car-id$="[[c.Id]]"&gt; &lt;paper-item-body&gt; [[c.Plate]] &lt;/paper-item-body&gt; &lt;/paper-item&gt; &lt;/template&gt; &lt;/paper-menu&gt; &lt;/paper-dropdown-menu&gt; </code></pre> <p>And the corresponding call : </p> <pre><code>this.selectedId=-1; </code></pre>