Posted March 11, 2012
In the pantheon of healthy things to eat, kale is just about perfect.
In a single cup of steamed kale, you’ve got more than 1,300 percent of your daily value of vitamin K, 300 percent of recommended vitamin A and 88 percent of your daily dose of vitamin C. Kale is also supercharged with manganese, fiber, iron, calcium and potassium, making it one of the most nutrient-dense greens out there.
Recipes included with this story: Whole-Wheat Spaghetti With Kale, Braised Kale With Cherry Tomatoes, Kale and Potato Soup With Red Chili.
Kale is part of the cruciferous vegetable family, which includes brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage. Nutritionists and doctors love these veggies because they are loaded with antioxidants that can help fight inflammation and cancer, and can help lower cholesterol and rid the body of toxins. In the George Mateljan Foundation’s list of the world’s healthiest foods, kale rates near the top, and it recommends you eat it as much as four or five times a week.
Those healthy qualities are among the reasons that kale has gone from being woefully overlooked in the produce section to one of its leafy stars. Another reason is that when it’s prepared properly, kale is downright delicious.
In its raw state, kale makes fantastic salad greens. I love tossing the roughly chopped leaves in a simple dressing made out of olive oil, lemon juice and a bit of tahini, then topping it all with toasted sesame seeds. Because kale leaves are sturdier than regular lettuce, they won’t break down and wilt from the dressing’s acid — one of the reasons you often find dressed kale in the salad bars of upscale groceries these days. If there’s leftover kale salad from dinner one night, it holds up perfectly to be a nutritious lunch the next day.
In the morning, a few kale leaves can ramp up the nutrients in a breakfast smoothie — just blend with a cup of rice or almond milk, a frozen banana and a few slices of vibrant-tasting fruit, such as mango or pear. Drinking something that’s bright green feels really space age, and the puree makes it all easy to digest.
Kale really shines when it’s cooked. First, you’ll want to remove the leaves from the sturdy stems, which a lot of recipes tell you to discard. Rather than add them directly to the compost, I toss them in a freezer bag along with other vegetable scraps to make vegetable broth later. The stems can also be chopped more finely and added to veggie sautes or stir-fries — just remember the stems will take a few minutes longer to become tender than the leaves will.
The easiest way to cook kale is to gently steam it. Just put a steamer insert over a couple of inches of boiling water, add chopped kale leaves, cover and wait for five minutes, then season with a little salt and pepper and serve as a side dish, or on a bed of cooked quinoa or brown rice as an entree. It’s a virtually fat-free meal.
Nearly as lean is Braised Kale With Cherry Tomatoes from the just-released “The New Mayo Clinic Cookbook.” Only a couple of teaspoons of oil are needed to saute garlic, then the kale is braised in vegetable broth before being finished with lemon juice.
You can use kale in place of spinach in a lot of recipes, such as layered in a lasagna, or added to a soup like Deborah Madison’s Kale and Potato Soup With Red Chili, which has enough body to act as an entree with a loaf of crusty bread.
Alice Waters turns kale into an even heartier main dish with her Whole-Wheat Spaghetti With Kale, a triumph of simplicity that became vegan when we substituted vegan Parmesan-like topping for the few shavings of cheese that she used to finish the dish. It’s a substitution that changes very little because dried chili flakes, onion and kale are the predominant flavors.
When shopping for kale, you’ll find both conventionally grown and organic bunches in most supermarkets. But this is one place where paying the extra for organic is worth it, because it’s one of the 12 fruits and vegetables that the Environmental Working Group has determined have the most pesticide residue when grown on regular farms. Different varieties such as lacinato (or dinosaur) kale can be used interchangeably in most recipes, offering subtle flavor variations.
And trying out those different varieties offers the perfect excuse to make Waters’ spaghetti dish over and over.
Grant Butler Follow @grantbutler
©2012 The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.)
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