Try gentle 250 or 200 degree oven; you just want dehydrate the kale, not char it. It’ll take a few hours before you wind up with kale chips, but it’s mostly hands-off work.

The hands-on part is the best part, anyway, and I do mean hands-on. Start with maybe two bunches of kale. I use a mix of curly and black (a.k.a. dinosaur, Tuscan, or Lacinato) kale from my garden, but if you are buying kale, just get curly, which tends to be cheaper, and I like how it gets so crispy around its frilly edges.

Stem the kale. I like to stem my kale by stripping off the leaves with my fingers. It’s faster, and touching kale feels nice. It transfers life energy into you when you handle it.

Wash the kale and dry it out (a salad spinner is nice for this). Next, lay out a few clean tea towels and thoroughly pat the leaves dry. Paper towels will work, but they are not as absorbent. Be a grownup and just use the tea towels, okay? Your kale deserves to be pampered.

Next, get out two baking sheets. Old, cruddy ones are the best. Don't bother lining them with parchment; in fact, I think the kale's direct contact with the pan is better for crisping up the leaves.

Dump the dry kale in a pile on one of the sheets and then drizzle the pile with about a tablespoon of tasty olive oil. Use your hands to slick up each leaf of kale so it glistens with oil but isn’t dripping. This is the sexy part. Enjoy it. Don’t rush. Lay the slicked-up leaves one by one on the empty baking sheet, making sure they more or less don’t overlap. Keep on going until both baking sheets are full. Pour a little more olive oil right onto one of your palms if the kale starts to seem dry, then continue with the kale slicking-up process.

Sprinkle the kale with the salt of your choice. Last time I made these I used both Maldon sea salt and homemade shichimi togarashi, but just salt alone is fine, or maybe even better.

Bake in a 200 degree oven for an hour. Check on the kale—probably it will be shriveled up and mostly brittle. For good measure, turn off the oven and leave the pans in for another hour or so. No flipping the chips over or aything. This is when you can take a nap, if you are not a parent to young children. Put a Post-It on the oven door saying something like “KALE CHIPS INSIDE DO NOT PREHEAT!” if you are afraid someone will come along and endanger your kale chips. If they are still soft after all this, just turn the oven back to 200 degrees and dry them out for another 15 minutes or so.

Store the cooled kale chips in an airtight container for up to a month. Lately I’ve been thinking of them as condiments, crumbling them over soups or slipping them into sandwiches (just like I know you did with potato chips as a kid). I really enjoy them on top of cheese pizza slices.