Kale is the green of choice on spring menus

Kale, the leafy cousin of broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, is the darling of salads this spring, but it’s also finding its way onto flatbreads, condiments and even cocktails.

“It is the uber-trendy healthy salad green right now,” said Nick McCormick, chef of TAP in Atlanta, who combines baby kale with roasted tri-color carrots, raisins, candied pecans and yogurt dressing in a $9 salad.

“I wanted something on the menu that was more rustic,” he said. “The kale has a great earthiness to it that works well with the sweetness of the carrots and raisins,” he said.

Kale Caesars started spreading on menus in 2011, and they still can be found at restaurants such as Oak Tavern in Miami and Tongue & Cheek in Miami Beach, Fla., and at Carter’s Kitchen in Mt. Pleasant, S.C., but kale-and-raisin treatments such as McCormick’s are particularly popular these days.

At Napa Valley Grille in Westwood, Calif., chef Taylor Boudreaux rehydrates raisins with a combination of rum, orange juice and simple syrup. “They plump up real nice and they add a great flavor,” he said.

He tosses them, along with toasted almonds and Parmesan cheese with two parts kale, chopped in a chiffonade, to one part chopped romaine lettuce in a vinaigrette made with lemon juice, Dijon mustard, Parmesan cheese, basil, garlic, shallots, olive oil and Champagne vinegar. He sells the salad for $10.75.

“If I took it off the menu there’d be rioting in the streets of Westwood,” he said, adding that he goes through nearly two cases of kale a day, just for the salad.

“It’s so popular that I actually keep copies of the recipe printed at the host stand,” Boudreaux said. “We go through 50 copies a week. I figured, why fight it?”

At Superba Snack Bar in Venice, Calif., Jason Neroni makes sweet-and-sour bread and butter pickles out of raisins, with jalapeños added to give them some kick, and puts them in a salad with finely chopped raw black kale, pine nuts, fiore sardo pecorino cheese and croutons, tossed with lemon juice, olive oil and mint.

He sells about 30 of the $13 salads each night in his 60-seat restaurant.

Neroni said the dish was inspired by a salad with chicken, currants and pine nuts he had at Zuni Café in San Francisco. “Kale is great in itself, but it needs some flavors to counterbalance the bitterness," he said.

Cider-plumped raisins are part of the Spring Market Vegetable Salad that’s being added to the menu at Los Angeles-based California Pizza Kitchen for the spring. The dish also has purple kale, field greens, spring peas, Granny Smith apples, red radishes, toasted pecans, dill and mint. The salad is tossed in Greek yogurt vinaigrette and is sold at the 223-unit chain as an entrée at an average price of $9.75.

Moving beyond salad

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Kale is made into a pesto at Found Kitchen and Social House in Evanston, Ill., where chef Nicole Pederson spreads it onto a squash and mushroom sandwich for $11.

“I use kale in place of [other] greens or herbs for it to be really hearty and a real component of the sandwich rather than just a background sauce or flavoring,” she said. She replaces the cheese that would normally be in pesto with tofu to keep it vegan and to make it creamier, and replaces the usual pine nuts with walnuts. “They are roasted dark to give them depth, and then finished with fresh garlic and extra virgin olive oil,” she said.

“Kale is now finally getting the love it deserves,” she said. “I think partially due to the large variety of kales on the market. It is now more than just the curly stuff that was used to garnish buffets. It’s the gray, red Russian and black kales that are my favorite and are tender enough to make lovely salads.”

Mike Franzetti, the chef at Alice’s Arbor in Brooklyn, N.Y., makes a kale tartine, for which he slowly cooks the kale in garlic oil for 30 to 35 minutes.  Then he reheats it in olive oil to order and puts it on slices of toasted bread and sprinkles it with feta cheese mixed with red chile flakes. He broils the dish for 30 seconds, finishes it with olive oil and serves it on his lunch menu for $5.

At Saison in San Francisco, chef Joshua Skenes’ has fittingly named one of the courses in his 18- to 20-course menu “Brassica.”

To make the dish, he slowly dehydrates kale, mustards and seasonal wild brassica over a low fire to make chips. “It takes about an hour per chip,” he said.

He serves the chips on a stew of grains, including faro, wild rice and Ethiopian wheat berries that have been smoked and then cooked in a bouillon of wild seaweed. He rounds out the dish with puffed grains and a quail egg and pours more seaweed bouillon on top at tableside.

“We just tried to bring out the natural, inherent flavors in the product and make them as deep as possible,” he said.

Restaurants are also incorporating kale into their drink menus.

Tortilla Republic, which has locations in West Hollywood, Calif., and Poipu on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, uses fresh-pressed kale juice in its $12 Kale Margarida, which combines silver tequila with orange juice and sweetened lime juice with the kale juice.

The $10 Kale Cocktail at Asador in Dallas uses reposado tequila, kale-infused simple syrup, mango juice, orange liqueur and orange bitters. The drink is served over ice in a glass rimmed with pepper and pink Hawaiian sea alt.

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected].
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