Video:Kale Braised With Prosciutto

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Transcript:Kale Braised With Prosciutto

Hi, I'm Erica Wides from Chefsmartypants.com here for About.com. Kale is a super food. It is extremely nutritious and very good for you. Very high in vitamins. But nobody knows how to cook it.

Braised Kale and Prosciutto Ingredients

What I'm going to do today is cook this kale in a method that we call braising. And braising is when you cook food gently in a little bit of liquid. I'm going to braise this kale today, with prosciutto - which is this fantastic dried cured ham from Italy that has incredible flavor and has delicious kind of meaty saltiness and is great with green vegetables. We'll also throw in a little bit of garlic of course. Cause it's good and good for us. And we'll braise the kale and the prosciutto with some white wine and some chicken stock.

Cut the Prosciutto

So, my kale is washed and cut and ready to go. And, I'm just going to cut up my prosciutto into some strips. So, I'm just going to loosely sort of roll it up and cut it into thin ribbons and my garlic clove, I'm just going to give it a little tap. I just want to crush it.

Heat the Ingredients

Now, the prosciutto has a little bit of fat on it. So, we're going to get some of that fat out of the prosciutto and into the pan. But, we're going to help it along just a little bit. Just like a tablespoon of olive oil and then I will put in my garlic clove and I have the flame on this pretty low. I want to kind of gently my garlic begin to perfume my oil. I don't want to burn my garlic. So my flame is pretty low. Then I will throw in my shredded up prosciutto. And if any of it kind of got clumped up together when you were cutting, just break it up a little bit. What we're looking to do here is something called rendering. We're rendering out the fat in the prosciutto.

Cook the Kale

So now you can see that the prosciutto has rendered out most of its fat and it's getting a little bit more crispy and it's starting to look more cooked. That's what we're looking for. Now, into this I'll add my kale. Now, my kale was washed and it was drained. But, it still has a little bit of water left on it. And that's important because you need that water to create a little bit of steam to let the Kale begin to wilt in the pan. So in goes the Kale and you want to toss and make sure that the prosciutto and the oil get really well distributed on the kale.

And, I'm going to add some salt to this pan. But not too much because the prosciutto itself is already pretty salty. So I want to go just a little bit of seasoning there. And, of course, a little fresh ground black pepper. We want to let the kale wilt a little bit. You can see that the kale is starting to change color. It's getting brighter green. And now I'm going to throw in some white wine. A couple of table spoons of white wine to add a little bit of acidity and also to create steam. Just give that wine a minute to cook out. What you want to do right now is vaporize the alcohol and also cook out the water in the wine.

Once the water is cooked out we'll be left with the flavor of the wine. Once the wine is gone you'll see that you won't have that much liquid left in the bottom. Then we'll add some chicken stock. I'm just going to wait a minute for the rest of my wine to evaporate out. And then I'm going to add another splash of chicken stock, about a quarter cup. And I want to bring this to a boil and then, I'll cover the pan. What I want to do now is really cook the kale and get it soft. And, I'm going to let the kale cook, with the lid on, for about 8-10 minutes.

We can see that the kale has cooked down quite a bit and it's gotten very soft and wilted. It's also a very good dish to just toss with pasta.

Thanks for watching. To learn more, visit us on the Web at About.com.