Smoked Chipotle Kale Chips

Yummy Kale Chips… and No MSG!

Everybody who tries them seems to rave about Kale Chips…and for good reason. Their texture crackles, crunches and delicious disintegrates in one’s mouth, and the ruffled edges of curly kale so nicely capture whatever flavorings have been added.

Thing is, many of the favorite recipes out there use raw cashews and/or nutritional yeast to give a kind of “cheezy” flavor. I love raw cashews, but I almost never used them in my recipes because they are both hard to find and very expensive. And I never use nutritional yeast - A, because I don’t like the flavor, and B, because I minimize the use of anything that may include forms of monosodium glutamate (MSG). People debate about whether nutritional yeast does or does not include a form of MSG, but whichever the case, it doesn’t taste “right” to, it doesn’t taste or feel “undenatured” in my body, and that’s always what I go with. So I won’t be including it in any of my Dehydro recipes.

Instead, I’m going to explore recipes that can be made from Utterly Pedestrian ingredients, or very simple, natural “superfood” ingredients very common in the raw world, such as Chia Seeds, Raw Cacao, Goji Berries and such.

Fresh curly kale, rinsed and shaken dry.

Adding the dressing to the kale...

Smoked Chipotle Kale Chips

These Smoked Chipotle Kale Chips use the neutral taste and texture of blended Zucchini to help create a kale-sticking dressing to distribute the flavor before dehydration. And the flavors are simple: smoked paprika, Chipotle Tabasco sauce, olive oil, lemon, and quality natural crystal salt.

So E-Z!!

Take a few minutes to rinse & shake the kale dry, a few minutes to make the dressing and rub & squish it into the kale, and then you just pop it onto a couple dehydrator trays, bung them into your Dehydro unit, flick on the machine and off go! No reason to feel intimated by the process of dehydrating, or to think that it is something laborious.

“How Long Do I Dehydrate? What’s The Right Temperature Setting?”

If you’re nervous about navigating potential enzyme-killing heat… relax. First, ascribing fear to how you’re feeding yourself is hardly a health-promoting outlook. Thinking stressfully is as much (or even more) a liability for your health as eating denatured food. And that, in my view, is the key here: you are minimally denaturing your food. You are taking a whole food, cutting it, seasoning it, subjecting it to some low temps to remove moisture. That is all.

Dr. Gabriel Cousens, a well-known raw guru, discovered that the “sweating” phase when dehydrating fruit & vedge actually lowers the temperature of the food and cause mold or fermentation if not adequately heated at the outset of the process. His recommendation is to start the process out at 145 degrees F, and then lower it to around 115. And that is what I do: 145 for the first hour, then 115 for 4-5 hours, or overnight, til done.

Smoky, zesty, spicy topping

Ready for the dehydrator!

Crunchy & ready for snacking!

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