Friday, February 29, 2008

CSA week 13 - baked collard chips

You may recall my post back in CSA week eight about baked kale chips. It's somehow made its way to the first page of Google results on the term and become one of the main drivers of the meager amount of traffic that makes its way to my blog. So today I bow to public pressure and churn out a low-rent sequel; I hope you're all happy.

Right, so collard greens--at least the ones in my share--are substantially thicker and tougher than kale so would the same spray-with-olive-oil-sprinkle-with-seasoning-bake-at-350-for-15-minutes-tossing-occasionally recipe work? As it turns out, yes.

You can see in the top photo that three whole collard leaves over-crowded my pan a little so the leaves spent the first five minutes steaming more than baking. But after they had shrunk a little I was able to redistribute them. The only tricky bit was making sure nothing was folded over because the overlapping bits don't dry out right.

Because of the slightly heartier nature of collards I used a steak seasoning sprinkle. It worked fine.

On a related note: if you're going to put radish greens on pizza bury them under the cheese or they'll get all dried out and crispy which doesn't really work.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

first
(tip: easy on the salt
i learned the hard way)

Anonymous said...

My chips were brown / burnt after only 10 minutes... so I'd keep a close eye on them, depending on stoves, etc.

Thanks for the great recipe!

billjac said...

Good points both. How tough greens are can vary a great deal and most ovens, electric particularly, are unreliable at lower temperatures. Also, overlapping leaves will slow down the cooking quite a bit. Check early, check often and adjust the oven temperature if things are going too fast or too slow. Underdone is much better than overdone so be conservative.

Hipnotizer said...

Get a dehydrator! They make kale and collard chips turn out wonderfully. My receipe for sour cream and onion chips is as follows

2 bunches of kale
juice from 2 lemons
Salt (to taste)
Pepper (to taste)
3 tablespoons nutritional yeast
1/2 cup of ground cashews
2 tablespoons of dill weed
one green onion diced

Mix kale with all the ingredients put on trays and dehydrate until crispy. Possibly the best tasting chips ever.

billjac said...

Why should I get a dehydrator when my oven works just fine? I don't have room to store another gadget to use once in a while.

Unknown said...

Good on ya mate for trying out collards.
We grow perennial tree collards (TCs)(currently have six of them over ten feet tall) and will try the collard chips this weekend.
BTW, the only way to get TC is by cuttings.
Cheers-
Michael