Wilted Kale Salad Recipe

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we are making a salad with a sesame miso dressing.

Now miso is an excellent thing to use. It has a very high quantity of protein because it’s made of soy beans but because the soy beans are fermented it’s a lot easier for your body to digest this protein. And it also brings some life back to your cultures because of the fermentation process.

So, I’m very excited to show you this recipe because it is the first salad that I made that I actually enjoyed eating kale. So what we’re gonna do is I’ll show you how to marinate this kale so that it softens up and it’s really nice raw in a salad.

The other thing I’m gonna put in here are mushrooms, sliced fairly thin and I’m gonna marinate those on their own separately and then last but not least avocado which is always a very yummy addition to your salad and it gives/brings a nice creaminess to the green from the kale.

What happens with the mushrooms and I’m gonna take these slices, put them in a container that has a lid here and then I’m gonna sprinkle some sea salt on them which is going to draw the moisture out of the mushrooms and it will make them nice and soft as if they’ve been cooked but we’re not gonna cook them with heat. We’re gonna cook them by shaking them.

And I call this marinated usually because most of the time I’m going to marinate them with some kind of liquid like a balsamic vinegar or a tamari soy sauce or something like that.

These ones I’m just gonna do with salt because I’m going to put the miso dressing on the salad so what happens is you shake these mushrooms up. The salt is gonna start to break them down and draw the moisture out of the mushroom to make it nice and soft.

So set those aside for a minute and we’ll get going on the dressing which is going to start with some miso! Surprisingly enough! And what I have is some miso that’s made with brown rice and soy beans. You can get all different kind of miso.

It’s always nice to get a variety so if you get a brown rice this time, try a different one next time and so on and so on. I’m going to add a bit of vinegar here and I’m using apple cider vinegar.

Brown rice vinegar has a lovely flavor and if you can get an unrefined one that’s excellent. I just got a huge jug of apple cider vinegar so I like to use it because it’s a lovely one, nice and refined and live culture in there and such so that’s why I use that more often than brown rice vinegar.

Ok! So mix that up, you want the miso to dissolve in the vinegar. Next I’m going to add oil and you want this to be about equal parts with the vinegar otherwise the vinegar is gonna kinda burn your mouth.

And if you wanted to this could be an excellent paste for a salad dressing. You’ve got the oil, you’ve got the vinegar and you’ve got the miso. And you don’t need to add salt to this because miso has quite a bit of salt in it so you don’t need to add anything extra.

But what I wanted to do is add some flavor to this dressing so I’m going to add a little bit of toasted sesame oil. Now this stuff is fairly strong so you don’t need much, that was probably a bit too much but got away from me a little bit.

And stir that up one more time, what I’m gonna use is just a spoonful of brown rice syrup to add a bit of sweetness to this because its going in a salad, I like it a little bit sweet so I’m gonna toss that in there and then let this dressing marinate and steep together for a little while - while I make the rest of my salad.

So I’ve finish the dressing over here. I’m just taking a peek at my mushrooms which are starting to soften up very nicely, they’re not as soft as I would like yet so while I continue making this salad I’ll just give it a shake every so often.

Ok! Next thing I’m going to do is the kale and kale has some pretty thick stalks so what I do is take the bottom leaves off, crack it and if its really thick you can cut this just to an angle.

So once you got things clean up, I would take the larger pieces of kale and just give it a slice down the middle otherwise you’re gonna have some huge long pieces of kale you’re gonna be trying to eat.

Alright! And all I do is just cut these into strips. Kale is a pretty strong ingredient so it can handle being cut with a knife. Ok! And then this is the fun part, you stick it in a bowl like so, take a bit of sea salt, sprinkle it over, that’s all it really need and then you’re gonna take your hands and then massage it like so.

And this is one of my favorite dinner activities because you can just watch this kale soften as you massage it. It also brings up beautiful smell of fresh green goodness.

It’s gonna start to get a little bit moist, the water comes out of the kale and the kale is gonna soften up so when we had that really tough curly kale before when we put it in a salad we don’t want to top down on that because it will be really hard for us to chew and digest.

So when we massage it like this, makes it a lot softer and nicer to eat as well as being more absorbable by your body.

Kale has a ton of nutrients in it. Calcium, antioxidants, lot of good stuff so making it more absorbable is really a good thing. So you can see its nice and dark green now because there’s water on the outside and it’s a lot softer, it’s gonna be a really nice salad.

For those of you who don’t know how to slice an avocado you take it the lengthwise, cut into it like that and just go right around the pith, give it a quarter turn and there you go.

Pith its gonna be on one side, the other side is gonna be empty, if your keeping half of an avocado leave the pith in and it will stay fresh for longer. For some reason the avocado thinks it’s still alive when it has the pith in it and it doesn’t start to turn brown as fast.

I like to cut my avocado in large chunks in this salad because oh I love avocado so getting a big mouthful is just the best. Alright! So we’ll throw that in the bowl with the kale and I will check out on my mushrooms which have been marinating for only about 10-15 minutes.

They’re starting to soften up really nicely. This is probably the earliest I would take them out. If you leave them longer just keep them shaking every so often, they’ll get even softer and you can do this all day.

You can just get them going in the morning. Leave them to marinate all day, you’ll come home and have some beautiful marinated mushrooms.

So give my dressing a little stir to get it ready to go on. A lot of miso dressings I notice have tamari or soy sauce in them. I don’t do that because when you get the flavor of tamari which is made from soy beans and miso which is made from soy beans, together they kind of confuse the flavor and I find it a lot smoother if I just use one or the other.

So try that next time you’re making a miso dressing. The miso adds a really nice thickness that’s gonna stick to the kale and the saltiness cuts through any of the bitterness that might be left although a lot of the bitterness goes away when you massage it as well.

Alright! There you go! A beautiful kale mushroom and avocado salad with sesame miso dressing, it is delicious. Like I said it was the first salad that I actually enjoyed kale and this is one that Phil and I really like to eat with chopsticks.