How To Prepare Kale for Salads and Cooking

Hello and welcome to my kitchen. I'm here today with kale and this is a special type of kale. This is called lacatino kale and I love this the most. You can recognize it by its mottled appearance and it's also quite soft which is why I like this. It's also usually richer in color suggesting more chlorophyll. So, everyone probably knows that kale is loaded with nutrients, specifically A, C, K, and E. And it's got plenty of calcium and potassium, so electrolyte rich. But did you know that kale is also cooling? So, kale has a bitter and astringent taste according to Ayurveda, which makes it cooling. It's also extremely supportive for liver health. That bitter taste stimulates the flow of bile. It's detoxifying and it supports the movement of food through the digestive tract. So if you're ever feeling heavy and congested, eat kale or any type of leafy green because it supports paristalsis or movement of food through the digestive tract. So buy a bunch of this. I'm going to show you exactly how to prepare it quickly so that it's ready to cook. All right, let's do it. Hello kale. Let's remove that twist tie. Here we go. Next thing you want to do is cut it off about here where the larger stems start. You see how that stem gets larger? Maybe about here. So, we're going to cut all of those off using a large knife. And these are going to be treated separately from everything else. We'll come back to that. Now, these guys here, depending on how comfortable you are with your knife skills, you can pile them up. And then I like to cut them in about 1 in or a little less of strips. And I'm using my largest knife. So, all in the same direction. And this is before washing. Note that this is before washing. I'm going to turn these around a little bit. And then I'm going to go through in the other direction. And I might have to go through on this other side as well. Now, look at this. Just like you buy in the store, if you buy a package of chopped kale, you just did it in 30 seconds or less. So, next, if you want to wash this so it's ready to go for future recipes, you want to put it in a basket, a salad spinner basket. And remember, I said we were going to do these separately. So, here's what we're going to do. We're just going to pull the greens off of the stems. So the stems here, just going to pull that right off one by one. By removing these tougher stems is ensuring that we get even cooking on this kale. So we still have some stems in our kale, but they're the smaller stems. Now these guys here, some of them are a little longer. So, I'm just going to get them all together and just do a few quick chops so that everything is matchy matchy. There we go. Now, we get to wash this. [Music]