I harvested my winter crop of kale yesterday. It's the variety often called "dinosaur kale" because the bumpy dark green leaves made somebody think they had the texture of dinosaur skin. This variety is also called "black" Tuscan kale. I harvested six or eight plants and picked all the leaves, large and small, off the stalks yesterday morning. That took about 90 minutes I think, and the leaves filled up a 15-liter bucket. That's 1.7 pecks, or 0.43 U.S. bushels of kale leaves. I looked it up, and learned that the U.K. bushel is not exactly the same as the U.S. bushel.
The first photo, above shows just a small portion of the harvest. This second one shows all of it, blanched, filling, for overnight storage, a fairly deep 12-inch baking dish. There are a few baby collard leaves in there too. I wanted to cook the greens in my crock pot (slow-cooker) but 15 liters far exceeded its capacity. So I had to blanch the leaves in boiling water on top of the stove first. That didn't take very long because I didn't need to put a whole lot of water in the big stock pot. When it boiled, it produced enough steam to cook the kale just enough to soften the leaves and make them collapse.
I thought I really hadn't planned this harvest very well, because I didn't have any bacon grease in the refrigerator. Then I remembered that the last time I went to Intermarché I had bought a big chunk of smoked
poitrine fumée (pork "belly" or "breast" a.k.a. "side meat"). That was perfect. I try to keep a piece of it on hand. It's sold vacuum-packed so it will keep for several weeks in the fridge after I buy it.
Here is the six-liter insert or liner of my slow-cooker with the blanched kale and the chunk of
poitrine fumée in it. There's also about a liter of the blanching liquid in there, along with some salt and plenty of black pepper. The slow-cooker insert I have is an aluminum pot with a non-stick coating on the inside. One advantage of having a metal insert is that I can set it on a burner on the stove to pre-heat it before putting it in the slow-cooker's heating element, giving it a head start so it cooks a little more quickly.
A Tuscan kale plant looks like this. The leaves are not as curly as the leave of the curly kale I used to cook, so they are much easier to wash thoroughly. The result is no sand in the bottom of the cooking pot. I also like red Russian kale, and I have some seeds so I think I'll grow some of that is spring. Notice how the Tuscan kale leaves are a nice dark blue-green color. I'm not sure if you can buy Tuscan kale in the U.S. but I know I've never seen it on the markets or in the supermarkets here in the Loire Valley. The widely available greens here are cabbage ("white" or Savoy), Swiss chard, and of course spinach.
In addition to the benefit of being able to set the metal insert on a burner on the stove to start the cooking process --it takes about an hour for the liquid in the ceramic insert of my slow-cooker to get to a boil at the high setting --, the metal insert must also be much lighter than a ceramic one, making it easier to handle and clean.
ReplyDeleteBoth the things you mention are big advantages with the aluminum non-stick pot that came with my slow cooker. Not to mention that the ceramic insert in my old slow cooker developed a hairline crack, either from thermal shock or from getting banged on the sink when I was washing it. Liquid started to leak through the hairline crack, so I had to get a new cooker.
DeleteWe definitely can get that Tuscan / dinosaur kale here in New England--unless there is a super-harsh winter, it holds up in the garden until the real snows start in January.
ReplyDeleteOur winters are milder than yours, and kale, chard, and collards can over-winter in the garden most years. Once in a while we have a very hard freeze, and when that kind of freeze is predicted I just go ahead and harvest the greens.
DeleteA local health food store has sold this for years. I loved it far before it became so popular along with all sorts of kale. Your way of cooking it sounds very good, though I never have much at a time.
ReplyDeleteI picked a little at a time all winter, and cooked small batches. Then the plants started going to seed, so I just pulled them all out, exept two small ones from which I hope to get some seeds when they finish flowering. The first time I ever cooked kale was in North Carolina a few years ago. It was the old curly variety, and I thought it was good, though my mother and sister were not enthusiastic. They prefer collard greens, as I do, but those are harder to grow here. Pests prefer them too!
DeleteYou really have a way with greens!
ReplyDeleteOften caterpillars and/or slugs eat all my collard greens before they have time to grow big. The Tuscan kale does better, and to me it has a lot of the same taste and texture as collards. I'm getting ready to plant some red Russian kale, which has a completely different texture when cooked, much softer and more like spinach.
DeleteSpring has sprung! The garden is producing.
ReplyDeleteI've seen the Tuscan kale in US stores, but generally not in big chain places, more likely in smaller, co-op type stores. Fresh kale, straight from the garden, is an entirely different eating experience than the stuff in grocery stores.
We've only tasted a few leaves of this kale crop so far. I think we'll have some for lunch today and find out how they really taste. I'm optimistic. I made my version of Irish colcannon yesterday, using half of a standard head of cabbage. I think I'll make a batch of colcannon with kale in a week or two.
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