(birds chirping) - Welcome back
to Jaques in the Garden.
Today, I wanted to show you guys three different kales
that I'm growing in my garden and how I use them.
(cheerful music)
So today, we're gonna start with this one here.
This has a couple different names that you commonly see.
Normally it's called dino kale or lacinato kale.
It's very typical to find this in the grocery store.
And a lot of people might think
that they don't really like kale
as much as they think they do, but it turns out,
if you grow your own kale, just like almost anything,
it tastes a lot better.
Most of the kale that you find in the store
tends to be a little more bitter
because it's grown in hot areas like Central California.
As kale experiences warmth, it produces more bitterness,
and actually winter-grown kale will even be sweet.
So keep that in mind in your garden.
You definitely wanna devote some space
to kale for the winter.
Now, the lacinato kale here,
the way it works is that it produces these thicker stems.
And then the leaves themselves
kind of wrinkle out from the stem
and you get leaf all the way down to the base.
So these are really great for actually anything.
You could use this kind of kale for salads
sautes, braises, soups.
Our personal preference for this kale is for salad
and/or for a saute in the pan.
Really quick, just give it some heat until it breaks down.
And it's just wonderful.
It holds up texture better than some of the other kales.
The biggest issue that you'll tend to have with them
is aphids and cabbage moths.
And the cabbage moths will create those little caterpillars,
and they'll eat up with your leaves
and you'll find little green poops all over the place.
So in terms of care, you wanna make sure
that they don't experience that much late afternoon sun
and they get plenty of water.
That's going to be your best bet for a healthy kale plant.
As you could see here,
this is actually up at my eye level.
So this plant itself, it's approaching six feet.
And the reason why it does that
is because it's just had no significant stresses.
So it hasn't actually bolted yet.
So this plant is now coming on two years.
By now, it actually will probably flower
because kale is biannual,
which means that it flowers on the second year.
So once it does that, you could cut off the base
and you'll actually get growth beneath it.
And you can actually see that right here.
This one's already started growing on the bottom.
So if I wanted to, I could cut this off,
and that'll just keep growing,
but let's go take a look at some of the other kales.
Over here in this part of my garden,
I actually have my red Russian kale.
So that's this guy right here.
And there's a really nice thing about red Russian kale
is that it produces these very tender leaves.
So if you were to look at a red Russian leaf
and you feel it, it's actually much more supple,
it's thinner and it doesn't have that almost waxy,
thick coating that the lacinato does.
So something like this is, again,
you could use almost any of these kales for anything,
but our personal preference
for red Russian is actually for salads.
It has such a nice, tender leaf
that it produces these wonderful salads
that's actually pleasant to eat.
It's not very fibrous.
It's not very tough and it has some sweetness to it.
It's very similar to any other kale.
It likes a lot of water.
It actually does want a little more sun.
I've noticed that over here on this backside,
you could see that the kale plants
are looking very kind of small
and not really that healthy.
And that's mostly 'cause this asparagus
has been crowding over it and actually shading it.
And then this plant has reached out into the sun
and it looks wonderful.
So in general, I think we wanna provide them
a little more sun than I'm providing 'em now,
but you'll see that they produce prolifically.
This thing is absolutely loaded in leaves.
And as they get older,
they will start to become a little more tough.
So for example, right here, you could see
that it's starting to have these little spots on it,
and that's just what happens as it ages.
You could still use this,
but it's not as nice as these young leaves,
like this one right here.
Actually, one quick thing to mention
before we move on to the next kale
is that if you see your kale flowering,
which this one was,
you can just pinch off that flower stock,
and what you'll get is more branching from the sides.
So that's what's going on here.
You see it has a lot of these little offshoots.
When I saw the flower, I simply removed it,
and I think it flowered
because I wasn't giving it enough water.
So stressed plants will flower earlier,
but traditionally, kale should flower on the second year.
So let's go take a look at another kale variety
that we love using in soups and for kale chips.
Over here at the end of my tomato raised bed
are my three curly kale plants.
So this is the third kale that I wanted to talk about.
This is a kale that is on the tougher side.
So between the first two, if I had to rate em,
red Russian would be the most tender,
lacinato would be second,
and then the curly kale will be the toughest,
so the more fiberous kind,
but it's really, really wonderful
for use in things like soups,
where you cook it for a long time.
Cooked with beans, it's really fantastic.
It becomes more tender, and kale chips.
This is a perfect variety for making kale chips.
It just does really well when you bake it in the oven.
It's got a ton of surface area.
Each one of these leaves is just all surface area,
which makes it great for holding things like seasoning.
So if you're making your kale chips,
you could really load this up with flavor,
'cause there's a lot of area
that it could actually grab onto.
I have to admit, this is the best version of this kale
that I've ever had growing here.
And I'll talk about why that is.
These are now coming into two years old,
so they look really great.
And you'll notice that this one's really tall
and these other two are a lot shorter,
and that's because this one has been topped.
So what I did is I just got a little quick saw
and I literally chopped the top off right here.
The reason why I did it at this height
is that I wanted it to be above the raised bed,
so that it did get some of that morning sun
that this (indistinct) would otherwise block.
And now, this is actually a single plant
that's emerged out of the main stock
and is now producing this wonderful kale.
So that's something you could do with kale.
You could actually keep kale going
probably three, five years.
Again, this is on the second year,
and this one hasn't even flowered.
The reason why you would wanna do something like this
is because rather than starting from a new plant
that has a very shallow, small root system
these plants have been in the ground now for two years,
which means that their roots are probably extending
multiple feet down and they're quite spread out.
So now, these have easy access to nutrients, to water.
They're gonna make much bigger leaves throughout the year,
and they're gonna probably be healthier
and look more vigorous.
So that's one reason you would wanna do this.
In this case, they're actually all being watered
off of a single olla.
So this is a small olla here.
And what that does is it passively,
sort of lets water infiltrate the soil around these plants.
And then these roots will now gravitate to that
and get all their water from there.
So this has become a very resilient system
of three kale plants
that are producing an absolute abundance of kale.
So curly kale, great for soup, great for kale chips,
but let's wait for the sun to come down a little bit,
and we'll do a little harvest in the afternoon
and make a kale salad.
The first step to making a kale salad,
of course, is to collect some kale.
So I have kale plants in two different areas.
I'm gonna start here.
I'm using my FELCO 321 snips.
I really like these guys
because the blades themselves are very short.
So it's really easy to get inside a bushy plant like this,
make a lot of cuts without really having any chance
of sort of cutting off the wrong thing,
which I think anyone who's gardened for some time
can say that they've definitely cut off
something they didn't wanna cut off.
So having the nice little blade is really handy.
So let's grab some leaves here.
I'm gonna get a pretty decent amount.
When you're making a kale salad,
a lot of it kind of shrivels down.
So you wanna get more than you think you need.
So I'm gonna clean up a little bit more here,
and I'll probably do some pruning
on these kind of uglier leaves
that are just not that healthy.
I'm gonna go ahead and leave these here.
And then let's go over to a second location
and get a little bit more kale.
An important thing to mention
when harvesting any leafy green, especially kale,
is to make sure that you're harvesting it
early in the morning, or at least in the evening.
So right now, it's the evening.
And the idea behind that is that you basically
just don't want your kale to be wilting
when you're harvesting it.
It's not gonna taste as good.
Some of that moisture's gonna be pulled out of the leaves.
Like right now, they feel really tender, cool.
They're going to just taste a lot better.
So let's grab a bushel of kale here,
and then we'll process it by cleaning it up
and make a quick salad.
(gentle music)
Before we do anything else, of course,
we have to clean our kale.
So let me just make a quick little pitch
to building yourself an outdoor sink.
I'm gonna use as much water as I need
because there's a bucket under here
collecting all the water running down,
and then I can take that water and water my garden.
I'm gonna go ahead and start rinsing.
I wanna make sure that,
especially with a curly kind of kale like this,
where it's all ruffly, that you flip to the backside,
and make sure you give it a good clean,
'cause that's where anything will be hiding,
if there's aphids or something like that.
The other thing you could do is get a nice, clean bucket,
fill it with water, shove your kale in there,
and just kind of mess it all around in that water.
But I don't have a clean bucket right now,
so I'm gonna use the sink,
and then we'll move on to the next steps.
Next thing to do is to just destem your kale.
Just grab your leaf, put your fingers
along the stem and pull it back.
That'll get pretty much all of it.
So I'm gonna go ahead and do this,
and we'll chop it up and make a dressing.
Once you have a good stack,
it's a good idea to just come in,
roughly cut it into whatever size chunks you want.
I'm gonna basically quarter this pile,
and then come across the long side
and probably cut it in like six rows.
Looking for pieces like that.
You could also just do narrow strips.
Doesn't really matter.
Either way, it's gonna taste great.
Now that the kale's prepped, let's make a little dressing.
There's not gonna really be any recipe here.
It's gonna just be sort of Asian themed.
It's gonna be a mix of rice vinegar,
some sesame oil, a nice, light, delicious soy sauce.
And I might throw in a little ponzu
to give it a little extra flavor,
and then I'll do some sesame seeds to kinda garnish it,
and also add some texture,
and a little squeeze a lemon juice for that acid.
So I'm gonna just kind of totally freestyle this,
and then just adjust it by taste.
Start with a tablespoon of vinegar.
Let's do, actually, let's double
everything I've done so far,
'cause it's a pretty significant batch of kale.
So there's two tablespoons of soy.
Do another tablespoon of that vinegar.
Come in with a tablespoon and a half-ish of sesame oil.
Maybe just a splash of ponzu, and then some lemon.
And some homegrown garlic.
So we're gonna just mince this up.
I'm gonna just really chop it up quite finely.
So we're not gonna use any salt here,
of course, 'cause we got the soy sauce.
Before we throw it on our kale,
let's do a little taste test.
It's always gonna need some adjustment.
It's actually pretty nice.
I wanna get a little more vinegar,
but I'm gonna do a sweet vinegar now.
Ooh, that's good.
Little more lemon.
Okay, that's good.
So what we're gonna do,
this is actually a pretty important step.
Whenever you're making a kale salad,
you don't wanna just eat it raw
straight up right away.
It has a lot of alkaloids that could be hard to digest.
A lot of people don't like that.
So what you wanna do is get your dressing on there.
You're gonna wanna massage it.
When I say massage, I mean be pretty rough.
So you actually wanna get in there with your hands
and really work the dressing into the kale.
This is gonna do a couple different things for you.
It's going to soften the kale even further,
so it becomes a much nicer texture.
The other thing it's going to do
is help break down those alkaloids.
'Cause we have the vinegars, we have the lemon juice,
and that's really what you need
to help process that kale a little bit.
The other thing with a salad like this
is you could just throw on things like toasted almonds,
sliced cucumber, sliced tomato fresh from the garden.
And there are a couple out there that have my name on it.
So we might go out there
and boost the salad up a little bit.
What we're gonna do now, let it sit in the fridge
for like half an hour before you eat it.
So let's wait,
and we'll come back and do a little taste.
While that kale is marinating,
let's go ahead and pop in and grab some cucumbers.
This is the Boothby blonde right here.
And over here we got the tasty green,
which is the one that I'm looking for.
All right, so we got our cucumber.
Salad's looking real nice.
So let's just go ahead and slice this up,
and then I'll give it a little taste test.
Last thing is some sesame seeds.
Again, texture, little bit of flavor.
That's why we also put the cucumber,
because when you have a salad, it's just way more fun
if you have some texture in there.
All right, let's give it a taste.
Man, tell you what guys, if you haven't made salad
from the kale that you grow in your garden,
you don't really know what kale is.
I'm not trying to be rude.
Kale you buy in a store simply just doesn't compete.
This is tender, has a little bit of sweetness.
There's no bitterness, none of that scary kale flavor
a lot of people think they hate.
So please try cooking with some kale.
Try growing new varieties, guys.
It is so worth it, especially through the winter.
That's it for today though.
I got a lot of salad to eat.
I'm gonna go enjoy it in the garden.
I'll catch you guys next time.