With an over abundant harvest of kale, silverbeet, chard and spinach in my garden I’ve turned to dehydrating and powdering their green goodness to keep for another day.
I really don’t like wasting food, as you can tell.
I have a home dehydrator which I enjoy using for a range of things including herbs, fruit slices and fruit pastes. My vegetable patch however has gone nuts lately and my dehydrating enthusiasm has stepped up a notch. When the freezer is full and you’ve bottled enough preserves, dehydrating needs to be on your to-do list I figure.
I have a Sunbeam Dehydrator I bought a few years ago. It has 5 stack-able trays plus a flat tray (perfect for liquids) and it plugs into a standard electric socket. While quite noisy when in use (similar to the sound of a hob extractor fan) I plug it in my commercial kitchen and close the door! The result though is awesome and I will overlook the hum and be thankful for saving so many vegetables!
There are several settings on home dehydrators and it takes trial and error to suss it all out, but I generally put it on high and check every few hours to see how the dehydration process is going. Some vegetables take 12 hours (such as my recent batch of dehydrated cauliflower florets) but leafy greens take around 3-5 hours, depending on your model and its function settings.
Leafy greens retain their vibrant colour and come out crunchy and brittle, just the texture you are after. While you can scrunch up the leaves and pack into jars so you can fit more in, I love powdering them instead. I have a ‘nutra-bullet’-type unit that blitzes them to smithereens in seconds.
How to use Powered Greens
Powdering dehydrated greens makes them very easy to store in an airtight container as they reduce down to a powder. You can use green powder in stocks, casseroles, sauces, dressings, smoothies, sprinkled on eggs and even sneak in a spoonful into baking (brownies are great as the chocolate brown overrides the green so it’s not so noticeable to the eye). Packed full of nutrition, go wild. This is concentrated green goodness in a jar – better still, you know exactly what’s in it….simply greens.
Update 22 Dec 2022: (original post published 6 Nov 2020) What took me so long to work this out!? Assorted green salad leaves (lettuce and rocket to name a few) dehydrate perfectly and, ground down to a powder, can be used year round.
Making Powered Vegetable Greens
Ingredients
- Any edible leafy greens you can get your hands on: silverbeet, spinach, beetroot leaves, carrot tops, kale, chard, herbs etc
Method
- Hold the stem in one hand at the base then run your fingertips up the stem with the other. The green leaf will come away easily leaving the bare stem. Reserve the stem for something else (like my Green Stem Soup which I will post shortly).
- Wash the leaves well in cold water to remove any bugs or dirt.
- Spin leaves in a leaf-spinner (you can pick up a lettuce spinner for a few dollars in the second hand store) to remove excess water, or drain well, or wrap in a tea towel.
- Tear leaves into small pieces then place in the trays of the dehydrator. Usually contents shouldn’t overlap although as there is so much water content in these leaves it isn’t so imperative as they will shrink quickly anyway.
- Turn on dehydrator (approx 3-5 hours) and ensure they are absolutely crispy before you contemplate storing. Leaves should crumble when pinched between your fingertips. If in doubt, dehydrate for longer.
- Transfer to a kitchen blitzer (food processor, etc) and pulse until leaves turn to powder or resembling fine tea leaves.
- Transfer to an airtight container.
