WCLD: Adventures in Kale Chips

Every Thursday and Friday I teach at a pre-professional dance training program in North Vancouver. In the courtyard of our building is a raw food/vegan cafe. The staff are a little hippy dippy and not the fastest servers but I have fallen in love with their kale chips. They are made with nutritional yeast (which I thought at first was cheese) and they are delicious. So I jumped on the kale train and tried my hand at making my own.

One bunch of kale makes loads of chips. Remove the leaves from the thick stem by either cutting or tearing.

Wash the leaves and dry thoroughly.

Tear the leaves into your favorite size and place on a parchment lines baking sheet (how much do you LOVE parchment paper? Right?!?). I decided to spray my kale with Pam instead of drizzling with olive oil - they would have been sopping with olive oil. Then sprinkle with salt. The first recipe I used said to bake at 375 for 10-15 minutes. For my oven this was too much. I baked my first batch for 12 minutes and were burnt :( See how they look all browny black....yeah that's how they tasted.

I turned down the heat to 350 (as directed by Martha). I also tried her recipe with lemon juice drizzled on the kale. I also lessened the baking time. To about 7-8 minutes. I found because of the extra liquid from the lemon juice I had to bake these a little longer, still less than 10 minutes though. I really liked the salt and lemon juice chips. They were zingy and delicious.

Then I tried parmesan cheese. These were pretty good too. Part of me wishes I had broiled instead of baked these ones to brown and melt the cheese. Also REAL grated parm would've been much better than 'powdered'.

Lastly I tried sprinkling the chips with taco seasoning-because taco seasoning already has salt in it DON'T over salt these ones or you'll be sorry. I think these might have been my favourite, but that might be because I'd finally figured out how long to bake them and how hot etc.

They weren't as good as the store bought ones-which I think are actually dehydrated not baked. But they'll definitely do in a pinch when I'm craving salty snack food....which is always.

Have you tried making kale chips?

How'd they turn out? Let me know!