One of the most flavor-packed ways to cook hearty greens — kale, collards and the like — doesn’t involve adding smoked pork or turkey legs. It doesn’t require a long cooking time, and it can be accomplished with a minimum of ingredients. This vegetarian cooking method just requires one special ingredient: fermented soybean miso paste.
Miso’s intense, salty umami brings the savoriness to greens usually found by a long cook time with smoked meat; stir it into a knob of butter and its flavor rounds out to become sweeter and richer, the perfect accompaniment to hearty green kale. (If you can find young, tender collards or you’re OK with this dish taking a bit longer to cook, they’ll also work great here. Allow at least 15 minutes to cook the collards, instead of five for the kale.) For milder flavor, use 1 tablespoon of miso in the butter. Bump it up to 2 tablespoons if you want a bolder dish.
While these greens make for a fine side dish, here I’m serving them on toast, topped with a runny sunny side-up egg, for a light supper. This dish also doubles down on the miso-butter flavor by spreading it on thick slices of country bread before toasting it under the broiler; the miso will bubble and brown, bringing roasty caramel notes to the bread. Just be sure to keep a watchful eye on the bread so that it doesn’t get too charred.
One final note: If you’d like to scale the recipe up to serve four, double the greens, miso butter, bread and eggs, but keep the remaining ingredients the same.
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