Kale! This powerful leafy green superfood is quickly finding it's way into the homes of many people who are trying to get healthy. And for good reason! It's packed with vitamins K, A and C, has more calcium than milk, more iron than beef, is loaded with antioxidants and is anti-inflammatory. If you haven't tried kale yet, what are you waiting for!? :) Scott and I both put a big handful of kale in our green smoothies every morning, but there are a few other ways to eat this super charged plant. One of those ways is kale chips!
Kale chips are great for people like me, who like to have food to pick at. I can get stuck mindlessly eating a bag of chips, but kale chips help erase the guilt! And they're super easy to make. You can use either your oven or a dehydrator. I like to use my dehydrator because I can control the temperature better, and keep the temp low enough so that they're still considered a raw food. By keeping them raw, more of the enzymes and nutrients are still intact.
You can play around with the different spices as you go, but this recipe for kale chips is one of my favorites so far. Today I started with a BIG bag of kale that I got from BJ's Wholesale. I know, not organic, but the convenience factor won me over because they were already broken into small pieces. If you do decide to use fresh kale, you'll want to make sure you wash it really well, remove the stems, and break it into small pieces. If you're using kale from a bag, be sure to go through and remove the stems.
- 1 large bag or 1-2 large bundles of kale, de-stemmed and broken into pieces
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Once you've washed your kale, removed the stems and broken it into pieces, put it in a large bowl and add the oil and agave. I usually use olive oil, but today the only oil I had in my house was coconut oil and it worked just as well, I just had to warm it a bit first so it was a softer consistency. Mix together one Tbsp oil to one to two Tbsp's agave, depending on how sweet you want them. Massage the kale with the oil and agave in a large bowl, making sure the mixture is coating all the kale. (Massaging kale is also great when using kale for salads, too!) Sprinkle with sea salt and cayenne. Be careful with the cayenne, the kale will shrink when it dehydrates, the cayenne will NOT!
- 1 Tbsp coconut oil or olive oil
- 1-2 Tbsp agave
- Himalayan salt
- cayenne pepper
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Once you have all the kale coated it's ready to go into the dehydrator. Spread out the kale evenly, then adjust your temperature so it's below 118 F. This will ensure that they're still raw. I put my temperature gauge somewhere between the first two settings. It will take a few hours for them to dry out. You'll be able to tell when they're ready because they will be crispy and won't be flexible. I just use a cheap dehydrator that I got years ago. It works well enough. Sometimes the food on the top shelves gets done a bit sooner than the bottom shelves, so I just remove the top shelves once they're done and keep the bottom ones on until they're ready.
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Once they're done they're ready to eat! Store them in an airtight container in the fridge. Just before I eat them I sprinkle them with nutritional yeast.
- 1-4 Tbsp nutritional yeast
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