Last week my daughter, of FAB Shows fame, turned me on to those awesome raw cheesy kale chips that are the equivalent of raw Cheez-Its® or, as some would say, “cheezy kale chips”. (Some even say “chreesy kale chips”, after that vegan, non-dairy cheese substitute called Chreese that is made and marketed by Edwards & Son, and whose main ingredients are wheat flour and nutritional yeast.) In any event, while “kale and fake cheese” may not sound very appetizing, trust me, these are the raw equivalent of Cheez-Its®! They are delicious! In fact, after she made them for us, we had to make more for ourselves just a few days later, we were so jonesing for them!
The recipe is really quite simple – the most time-consuming part is getting the kale into bite-sized pieces, and that is made much easier by cutting it (most recipes suggest tearing it), and then putting the chips onto your dehydrator trays.
Raw Cheesy Kale Chips – Raw Cheez-Its®
1 cup cashews, soaked in water for two hours
1 red pepper, seeded and diced
1 Tablespoon nutritional yeast (available in most health food stores)
1/2 teaspoon Himalayan pink crystal salt
Juice of 1 lemon
2 bunches green kale – either dino or lactino
Put all ingredients except the kale into a Vitamix or food processor, and blend until completely smooth.
Tear the spine out of each kale leaf, keeping each half of the leaf as intact as you can (as this will make cutting it into chips much easier).
Stack a bunch of the leafs together, and then cut them into bite sized pieces, using either kitchen shears or a sharp knife.
Dump all of the kale chips into a large bowl, add the sauce, and then mix it well with your hands, gently squeezing and massaging the sauce into the kale chips until all of the chips are well coated.
Lay the chips out in single layers – without the chips touching – on
Teflex sheets on your dehydrator trays, and dehydrate them at 105 overnight.
In the morning take the trays out, and transfer the chips onto dehydrator screens (i.e. on trays without the Teflex sheets).
This is every easy to do if you simply take an empy dehydrator tray with screen, and lay it on top of one of the full trays of chips (that are on the Teflex), like this:
..and then flip it over and peel the Teflex sheet back off the chips, leaving the chips on the tray with the screen:
Put the chips back in the dehydrator and continue drying them until they are very crispy. You want all moisture removed from them so that they don’t get soggy when you store them.*
Eat!
*Ok, who are we kidding? These barely make it out of the dehydrator before we’ve eaten them all up, let alone to the point of getting stored!
