Kale Crackers
adapted from an amazing raw food vegan food blog rawmazing. The main thing I changed was leaving out the coconut flour and adding sun dried tomatoes. If you like this recipe I recommend checking out more on Rawmazing, I've made several things from this blog and they've all been great!
Tools :Food processor, mixing bowl, rolling pin, silpat, food dehydrator
Time: All of it, well really about 20 hours with soaking and dehydrating time taken into account.
Ingredients
2 cups almonds, soaked overnight
1 cup ground flax seed
1 bunch kale, roughly chopped
1 cup nutritional yeast
1/2 cup sun dried tomatoes
2 tbsp chili powder (optional)
Salt + a lot of Pepper
There are a lot of steps, mostly because I've done this dozens of times, each time a little different. The gist of everything below is that we soak the flax with a cup of water. Put everything else in the food process (except the flax, salt, and pepper) blend until it's a dough. Mix in the flax, adjust seasoning, roll out, and dehydrate! Easy peasy!
Step by Step
Be sure to soak almonds overnight, or for at least 8 hours if you plan on making these later in the day. You can leave them to dehydrate overnight and wake up to some real nice crackers.
- Begin by mixing the ground flax seed with 1 cup of water. Let sit to absorb while we begin on some other activities.
- Drain and rinse almonds. Place in the food processor and pulse until grainy. Add Kale in batches and continue to pulse until well mixed.
- Add nutritional yeast and sun dried tomatoes and continue to blend in the food processor (these are the ingredients that give the crackers their "cheesy" flavor)
- Place our almond mixture in a large mixing bowl and add our soaked flax meal. It's best to mix with your hands, it'll be solid but sticky so wet your hands first so it wont stick as much.
- Taste the dough! There's no salt in it yet, but it will help you gage how much we should use later. If it tastes too bland to you, I recommend adding some spices. I typically add 2 to 3 tablespoons of chili powder or just paprika, depending on what I have on hand. The flavor of the cracker is fairly mild, so whatever spice you'd like to add can become the dominant flavor.
- To roll out do this on the silpat or parchment paper that you'll be dehydrating them on. (I've also done this on foil, but it's a little difficult to flip over later on) You'll get two or three batches out of this, depending on how thin you like them, so divide accordingly into two or three balls. Get the rolling pin wet so it doesn't stick and begin on the first one.
- Once it reaches desired thickness score using a knife to whatever size you'd like your crackers to be. I typically do small ones, the size of a cheezit. Sprinkle with Salt and pepper before placing in the dehydrator.
- Dehydrate at 115 to 120 degrees. Dehydrate time for me is typically longer than expected, but living in Seattle it's fairly humid. 10-12 hours is a good estimate, flipping the crackers once, typically a little over halfway through so they still hold together when I flip them. The top should be mostly dry at that point. Over drying is ok, I prefer it just because I like them real crunchy.
Note: I have doubled this batch and it worked out great, I recommend mixing using a stand up mixer rather than your hands. The only downside was that I had to use foil to roll out my extras, since I only have two silpats. Flipping the foil ones were impossible until the very end, as it stuck to the foil and tore.