Stay at Home: Sauteed Collard Greens with Garlic & Bacon

Learn how we made sauteed collard greens with garlic & bacon! It’s a delicious recipe that you can make while staying at home to go with just about anything!

Sauteed Collard Greens with Garlic & Bacon

When it comes to vegetables, there are only a few that Han will eat. He doesn’t like cucumbers, asparagus, mushrooms, turnips, radishes, and the list goes on and on. The longer we’ve known each other, I’ve learned to adapt and make meals that he’ll be more likely to eat such as string beans and one of his favorites, collard greens.

A similarity in the cuisines from our cultures is that we cook with garlic. A lot of Korean dishes have garlic in it and growing up, we’ve used either garlic powder or crushed garlic in many of our dishes. The one I am going to be sharing with you today is a recipe that’s a take on my mom’s garlic collard greens with a little bit of my own influence on it.

I will preface by saying I am not a chef, but these greens were too good not to share the recipe online.

INGREDIENTS:

• Collard greens ( 4 bags if bagged)
• Olive oil
• 3/4 pack of Smoked bacon
• 2 TBSP Crushed garlic
• 1TSP Cayenne Pepper
• 1 TBSP Lemon Pepper
• 2 TBSP Seasoning Salt
• 1 TBSP Paprika
• 1 TBSP Cumin
• One pack of smoked seasoning (This is optional. I used a seasoning packet I had specifically for greens, but any smoked flavor package can work).

STEPS:

1. THOROUGHLY CLEAN YOUR COLLARD GREENS
   1. First thoroughly clean your collard greens by hand rinsing them in your sink or in a bowl.
2. DE-STEM THEM
   1. As you clean it, try to take out any stems that you can find and de-stem your greens.
3. SLICE AND COOK YOUR BACON
   1. Began slicing up your bacon into quarter-sized pieces and cook them in a pan with a little oil spray. Bacon naturally makes it’s own oil so you don’t need to add butter or a lot of oil to it.
   2. You want the bacon to be cooked, but you don’t want it crispy. This should take around 3-4 minutes.
4. ADD YOUR GREENS
   1. As the bacon is cooking, slowly add your greens to your pot at a time. If using bags, I recommend 1-2 bags at a time until it gets low enough to add more.
5. DRIZZLE 2 CAP FULLS OF OIL ON EACH BATCH OF GREENS YOU ADD TO THE POT
6. Drizzling oil on top, but be careful not to add too much oil. Just around 2 cap fulls each time you add new collard greens.
7. SEASON YOUR GREENS FOR EACH BAG YOU ADD TO THE POT
   1. Once the oil is drizzled add your seasonings for each new bag of greens you place on-top to taste. For example, if using a smoked seasoning pack as I used half for the first batch of greens I let cook down a little and then added the other half to the rest of them.
   2. I’d recommend adding your seasoning to taste. I like my greens with a kick and a lot of flavors, so I tend to use each of the servings I listed above and add more to it, but ultimately season it to taste.
8. ADD BACON
   1. While the greens are cooking, add cooked bacon to the greens.
9. COOK IT ON MEDIUM TO LOW AND STIR UNTIL COOKED
   1. I like my greens to be soft, but not soggy so I cook it on medium to low heat and stir it until it’s the consistency pictured above. Usually, I get that desired consistency around 20 minutes of cooking, depending on how many greens I have in the pot.

Some additional substitutions you can make is if you don’t want to use pieces of bacon, you can use bacon grease and if you’re vegetarian, you can use seasonings that are used to smoke meat instead of the actual pieces of meat if that’s better.

That’s my recipe! What I loved the most about this particular recipe is that while I used a packet to help bring out more of the smoky flavor, the bacon is smoky enough that you could easily replicate this without it, as I have before. Traditionally we use ham-hocks, but the smoked bacon provides a similar flavor and gives the collard greens some extra texture.

What’s a recipe you made recently that you enjoyed?