Baked Kale Chips Recipe

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Hello and welcome to freshly served healthy vegan recipes. I’m Heather and today, by viewer request, I’m going to make baked kale chips and show you how to do that. I haven’t done them before because there are ton of recipes out there and they are fairly simple in terms of the recipe, but there is a technique to them.

So, I will mostly focus on the technique, and the recipe for this bake kale chips, you can find at healthyveganrecipes.net. if you’re wondering about the noise on the background, I’ve got some rain/freezing rain going on today and there are chunks of snow and ice that are falling off the roof.

What we’re going to start with is some kale, and I got some lush and ready to go. What you want to do is take your kale and rip off pieces, they don’t have to be too small, that’s probably the prefect size and they’re going to be turned into chips, obviously.

You don’t want them to be too small but you also don’t want them to be too big, there’s nothing like having a chip that big… Anyway, rip off your kale, and this week on my nutrition blog over at healthyeatingstartshere.com, I’ve been talking about weight loss and kale chips make an excellent snack weight loss.

Snacks when you’re trying to loss weight should usually be fruit or vegetable-based and kale chips are a nice way to make a yummy chip with very little calories and to get some otherwise not usually too friendly vegetables into your diet.

If you’re looking for other ways to make kale, last week I made a kale salad that was massaged - you can find that at healthyveganrecipes.net as well. So there’s one that’s a little bit big, so I’m going to rip that in half.

This is a very complex part of the operation, you need to have all of your mental faculties moving on this one. Now, you can bake your kale chips in the oven or in a dehydrator, if you do it in dehydrator the kale can stay more raw and retain more of it’s nutrients because it’s going in a lower temperature.

If you’re doing it in the oven and you don’t have a dehydrator, it’s totally fine. I’m going to do mine in the oven today. I would normally dehydrate them but my dehydrator is in the box in the shed and I don’t want to go look for it.

So, what I’m going to do is put the oven to very lowest temperature that I can, usually that’s about 200 degrees F. You can start your oven now but what I usually do is wait until I got everything ready and pop the kale in and then start the oven at that point.

Those are really need to be little prickly for this purpose. If you’re making something like bread or muffins, yeah, but kale chips, it doesn’t matter to too much. Also, the lower temperature, again, it’s better for retaining nutrients.

The temperature will depend on how much time it’s going to take to bake. The dehydrator takes quite a while and the oven is pretty quick. So, I got all my kale, ripped to pieces here and what you can do at this point if you like, to make them a little bit softer, a little bit moisture is to massage them.

I showed this technique in the kale salad last week, you can add a bit of salt here if you like or you can just use your hands. What this is going to do is to soften the kale up a bit and release some of the moisture, so I can feel it getting a little bit wet in my hands.

I will mean that as you bake it, it won’t be quite as tough. So, I found when I staring to make kale chips that lot of recipes just called for olive oil an d some salt and maybe some seasoning, whatever you feel like.

But, what I found in my experience is that if you want the seasoning to really stick to your kale and make a nice, crunchy, really flavorful chip, what you can do is actually blend up some nuts or seeds.

I like to do sunflower seeds, they’re a little bit lower in fat than most nuts, it got also nutrients. I blend the sunflower seeds with some water until they’re nice and smooth and add me seasonings to that – dip the kale chips in and get them ready to bake.

I’m going to start is to show you how to put this together. This miniature food processor is perfect for this purpose, if you don’t have one, you can use the regular size, or you can grind up the seeds, or if you choose to use nuts in the coffee grinder and them mix things together.

What I’m actually going to add with this is a little bit of fresh onion, and you do need to use some kind of food processor for that, and then I’m going to put in a little bit of water – you don’t want too much because you want this nice and smooth and thick.

It might take a while to get fairly smooth, especially because this little food processor has a lower speed than a regular size food processor, but get it relatively smooth and then you’re going to add your seasoning. I’m going to do some dill and that’s why I put the onion in there.

Onion is one of my seasoning, so if you’re doing a different flavor, you don’t need to put it in there. So, some dill and I love using nutritional yeast for cheesy flavor. I’m going for a sour cream and onion kind of flavor here, and then some salt.

Then, I’m going to put the lid back on and give this one last mix to combine the flavors. It’s important to give your mix a taste before you go splattering it over your kale, make sure you like it – it’s nice, it’s quite oniony because the onion is raw.

If you have onion powder, that’s a really nice option as well. But, because we’re going to put this in the oven and bake it, I think it will be okay. If you’re dehydrating this, I would probably really recommend onion powder over fresh onion, or just make sure you don’t use too much because it can get pretty strong.

Okay, take your mix and what I’m going to do is pour it onto my kale and then mix it in with my hands. It’s always good to get your hands into your food when you can, you can really connect with it, you know, just make sure your hands are washed first.

Alright, this is our mix with the kale and as I mixed this in and make sure the kale gets a little bit – I wanted to point out that kale itself is low calorie, the sunflower seeds do have calories, they also have a lot of nutrients so I prefer them over, say, olive oil for this purpose.

But, the less mixture you use to coat your kale, the lower calorie they will be. So, try to get them all mixed and get a little bit of coating on all of the kale. Sometimes you’ll wind up with some chunky bits of sunflower seed, those will be nice, and they’ll make for a nice crunch on your kale chips.

So then you’re going to lay this out as thinly as possible onto a baking sheet. I got my baking chip lined with parchment paper, sometimes a glass, if you want to use to line your dehydrator trays because they sell this Teflon type stuff as a liner, when I use my dehydrator, I usually use parchment paper.

Works just as well plus you don’t have to worry about any weird Teflon side effects. Okay, like I said, get them spread out as evenly as possible so they all get heat and pop in the oven – lowest temperature as you like. The lower, the longer it will take.

You know when your chips are done when they’re very nice and crispy. I’ll post this baked kale recipe at healthyveganrecipes.net, along with some flavor combinations. You can do this with things other than kale, you can do a chard, other green, or I often do it with zucchini slices and eggplant sizes as well.

So, go check out the recipe and send me your favorite flavor combinations as well. Hope you enjoy, I’m Heather from healthyveganrecipes.net.