Question
Lilly Boulianne
I just bought a bunch of kale at the market and decided to dehydrate half of it. The taste is pretty bland and neutral. Any suggestion of how to use it in cooking?
Answer
When I dehydrate kale, I always apply, uh, a seasoning or a flavoring scheme to it. 'cause I just want to take that dried kale and just eat it like a chip or a snack. So typically when I, um, get kale from the market and I want to use it in a dehydration type scenario, I'll take it. I may add, um, just a tiny bit of maple, maybe some miso. It could be a soy sauce and apple cider vinegar. I could put, uh, dehydrated garlic and onion and chili flake on it. Any number of things, any kind of flavors you want to use. So, um, but essentially I'll just coat those leaves with just a little bit of a seasoning. You know, it could be some dried, um, spices. It could be some other umami rich, uh, ingredient, like I said, miso or soy or some other thing. Sometimes a little bit of acid is also nice. And then, you know, not too much again, 'cause you're trying to dry these out. You don't want to add li too much liquid, but just enough to kind of coat these things. Some people like, you know, like, uh, different types of coatings, you, but sesame seeds, uh, nutritional yeast, all those things can also help and, you know, adding some crunch and some texture. But that's typically the way that I would use it, um, just from a dehydrated point of view. Otherwise, it is just like a, a dried kale leaf, right? This probably tastes pretty good, but it's not gonna have a whole lot of excitement. Um, so maybe just give it a try next time, Lily, and see what those, um, kind of kale chips look like for you. Um, those work really well in a dehydrator at a low temperature. If you don't have a dehydrator, um, what I recommend is putting your oven on to like the warm setting, which is usually like a 1 75. And, you know, putting him in there, maybe kind of manipulating it a bit. If it's getting too hot, opening up the oven door. If you can have a convection fan move the air around. That also helps, um, any combination of things. Then just at some point just turn the oven off and let it just kind of be warm and dehydrate those, those kale chips. You don't want to go too hot 'cause you don't want to like scorch or burn, uh, the kale.
