How to Dehydrate Kale for Making Kale Chips or Kale Powder – fabulous method to preserve kale well past the season!
How to Dehydrate Kale?
(I should caution you that if you are doing this to make kale powder, this is not the time to flavor up your kale with oils and salt or anything that can go rancid. Keep these leaves plain. If you’d prefer, you can always freeze your kale, too.)
1. Wash Kale thoroughly. Like spinach and other greens, it can hide nasties in its leaves, so you want to make sure to get rid of all of it.
2. Cut out any thick ribs from your kale leaves. These don’t taste good, they don’t powder up well, and can be kind of icky.
3. Pat dry. The more you can dry your produce now, the less time it takes in the dehydrator
4. Lay it out on your dehydrator trays, and then dry at about 125 degrees until they are nice and crisp. This is going to be fully determined by how wet they were when you put them in, how large the chunks were, what the humidity in your area is, whether the Moon is in the house of Venus or rising past Jupiter or if it’s Shrove Tuesday 1986. Sometimes, you just need to check after a couple of hours and keep checking! Generally, mine are dry in around 4-6 hours.
Now, if you don’t have a dehydrator, you can use your oven and baking sheets. Just turn your oven on to it’s lowest setting, put something in the oven door, so it doesn’t close all the way, and watch those puppies closely. Also, you can bake for about 30 min, and then you’ll have to check for doneness and continue baking if they aren’t crispy. So, don’t overlap them for the best effect.
This is the basic plan. You can store these, but in this state, they’ll just crumple up into bits of dry kale. But hmmm…what can you do with crumpled-up bits of dried kale?
Tips
Need some flavor to your chips?
Toss them in a bit of olive oil or coconut oil, salt, nutritional yeast, parmesan, ranch seasoning, or other fun flavors of your choice. Don’t use too much oil, or they’ll be greasy. Just a wee bit will do you. Serve immediately.
I’ve sometimes added the oil and salt before I dehydrate, but it can make the chips harder to determine if they’re done. But it still is great. So, you won’t be able to store these chips for the long term because of the oil, so eat ’em up now! They’re YUMMY and nutritious!
One of my readers, Paula, shared how she makes Kale Chips in the oven:
“Kale chips. Like potato chips, but Kale instead. Spray clean, wash Kale (I tear it into smaller pieces) with Pam (I make it from extra virgin olive oil and water), arrange on tin foil on a cookie sheet, and bake at 300 degrees for about 10 – 15 mins.”
