Recipes

Make Your Own Greens Powder

Enhance your daily diet with fresh, homemade greens powder

By Jenn Chic /

Credit: Jenn Chic

Packed with vitamins and minerals, greens powder can add more nutrients to your everyday meals

Use your extra leafy greens to make a healthy greens powder you can add to smoothies, yogurt or juice

Making greens powder takes a bit of time, but it brings the feeling of summer to gloomy mornings. As an addition to smoothies, yogurt or juice, greens powder increases nutrient content considerably with vitamins A, C, K, B12, and a heaping helping of essential minerals and anti-oxidants.

Green leafy vegetables sprouting out from the soilAt the farmers market I love picking up bunches of carrots with greens intact, french breakfast radishes with an abundant bouquet of leaves, besides all the wild greens, bitter greens, Asian greens, oh boy!

I tend to get carried away and my crisper does often overflow. Rather than letting anything go bad, I just start filling the trays of my dehydrator. Every week, another load of greens gets dried, ground and added to a jar. Within a couple months, as quickly as summer flies by, the jar fills up. It takes a bit of patience but the result is a super-powered, nutrient dense powder.

Do-it-Yourself Greens Powder

Ingredients

  • Greens – fresh spinach, chard, kale, arugula, nettles, watercress, Asian greens, radish tops, carrot tops, parsley, mint.
  • Dried blueberries, rose hips, acai berries or green tea powder (optional)
  • Ground flax seeds or hemp seeds (optional)Add a few tablespoons just before the jar is full and store powder in the fridge as ground flax and hemp seeds will go rancid at room temperature.

Instructions

  1. Place greens in a thin layer on dehydrator trays and dry according to manufacturer’s suggested time.
  2. Remove leaves once they’re crispy and crumble into a coffee grinder.
  3. Pulse into a powder and add to a jar.


Greens on the dehydrator and the final product. Images by Jenn Chic

Up the anti-oxidants in your powder with green tea powder, dried rose hips, dried blueberries or acai berries. Pulse them in a clean coffee grinder first if you’re worried about your blender’s ability to break them down.

Without a dehydrator, most greens can be dried in an oven overnight with just the pilot light on or at the very lowest setting. Many herbs will dry on the counter, out of drafts and direct sunlight, when placed on a sheet of newspaper or a screen.