My brother Eddie was over for dinner a while ago one fortuitous night when we happened to be having collard greens. I say fortuitous because Ed introduced us to a wonderful new way to serve these healthful, somewhat bitter greens—with barbecue sauce.
Huh? Barbecue sauce?
Ed explained that whenever he had collard greens it was with barbecued ribs, and the sauce from the ribs would make its way over to the collard greens, making them taste oh so good. Well, that was enough incentive to try it, and I must agree, collard greens are excellent served with a little BBQ sauce.
They are also pretty good on their own with onions and garlic. Here’s a great base recipe, feel free to add the BBQ sauce!
How to Make Collard Greens
Collard Greens Recipe
PrintWe use bacon fat here primarily for flavor. Bacon fat provides an excellent balance to the natural bitter of the collard greens. That said, you can easily skip the bacon fat and just use a little more olive oil.
Ingredients
- 2 lbs collard greens, tough stems discarded, leaves chopped
- 2 Tbsp medium onion, chopped
- 1 large garlic clove, minced
- 2 teaspoons bacon fat
- 1 Tbsp olive oil
- 2 Tbsp dark sesame oil (Dynasty or comparable)
- Chili pepper flakes, a pinch
- Salt, a couple pinches
- Sugar, a couple pinches
- Barbecue sauce (optional)
Method
1 Use a large skillet with a tight fitting cover. Melt bacon fat and heat olive oil on medium heat. Sauté onion until transparent, a couple of mintues. Add garlic and and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds.
2 Mix in the greens, sesame oil, chili pepper flakes, salt, and sugar. Cover and cook until tender, 8-15 minutes. (Note that young collard greens will cook up relatively quickly. Older greens may take upwards of 45 minutes to tenderize.)
If you want, serve with barbecue sauce.
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Loved the taste of these collard greens! I’ve tried them one time in a restaurant and they were mushy. These came out crispy and very flavorful! Very easy. I used olive oil, no bacon fat.
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Great recipe. MMMMMMM
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I have a similar recipe for collard greens and wrote about making it in my memoirish and topical food blog called cooking the kitchen. Here is a preview of what I wrote:
I had a lot of left over collard greens after preparing the recipe for Lasagna with Collard Greens, that had recently been featured on this web site. Always the girl scout, in that I like to be prepared for all possibilities, I bought a bit extra of those big, leafy green fronds. This was in case some of the leaves in the bunch to be used for the lasagna recipe, turned out to be less than stellar. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. Thus this recipe for easy peasy, cheesy, saucy, collard green casserole was invented.
Check out more at
http://www.cookingthekitchen.com/cheesy-saucy-collard-greens-casserole/#
Collards, yum. Oil of roasted sesame seeds – now that’s unique and does not appear in any known Shakespeare witch scene. But even if I cared not a bit about greens I’d have been delighted to stumble upon Elise’s serendipitous prose. I have a pot of collards concatenating as I type.
Now where’s that Threadgills recipe for chicken fried steak….
Cooked this recipe with chinese sausage and my family loved it. The use of sesame oil inspired me to do that (plus I did not have bacon then). Thanks for posting it.