Like a good vegan girl, I love love love kale chips.
I will happily eat a bunch of kale in the form of those light-and-airy home-baked ones with a little oil and simple flavorings (like my Sweet Onion Kale Chips.)
But I’m also crazy for those covered-in-sauce, really crunchy store-bought chips. But they are so expensive!!! Even the Trader Joe’s version is a pretty pricey snack, considering there are two servings in a bag.
So after much experimenting, I have finally come up with a home-made version. I just based my trials off the ingredients list on Trader Joe’s nacho flavor and adjusted from there. If you taste this sauce raw, you might think it’s too powerful, but after long slow baking, the flavor seems to mellow a lot. My first couple batches were just too bland. I upped the garlic a LOT, and at the suggestion of the wise foodie BF swapped bell peppers for pickled sweet-and-spicy cherry peppers. Delish! These are so satisfying, so crunchy, and really easy! Love them.
serves 4
1 C raw cashews, soaked overnight
3 T nutritional yeast
4 cherry peppers
1 T onion granules
3 cloves garlic
1 t celery salt
1/2 t ground turmeric
1 small bunch kale (about 5 C torn into bite-sized pieces)
Preheat oven to 225 degrees.
Blend everything except kale in a food processor until smooth. Then smother kale with the mixture, trying to make it pretty evenly distributed and avoid any large clumps of sauce.
Bake for about an hour and a half to two hours. To determine if the chips are done, squish the one you can find with the biggest glob of sauce. When that is not squishy at all, the chips are done.
If you feel like it, you can definitely take out the chips with less sauce when they’re done, but they really don’t seem to burn if you keep them in while the saucier ones bake. If there is a huge discrepancy in the amount of sauce on your chips, this might not be the case.
Nutrition facts per serving: Calories: 240; Calories from Fat: 148; Total Fat: 16.4g; Saturated Fat: 3.2g; Sodium: 80mg; Total Carbohydrates: 18.3g; Dietary Fiber: 3.4g; Sugars: 1.8g; Protein: 9.4g
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