This hearty kale salad is anything but boring: tossed with tangy lemon and flavorful pecorino cheese and topped with nutty farro, crunchy sourdough breadcrumbs, and tart dried barberries.

The addition of nutritious farro makes this salad suitable as a meal unto itself, perfect for lunch or a light dinner, though it’s also lovely served as a side salad alongside some grilled chicken or seared steak.

As our friend Richard used to say… it’s delicious AND nutritious!

The base of this kale salad recipe comes from the Six Seasons cookbook, and it’s one we’ve made many, many times (it’s one of the few kale salad recipes I actually like).

While the original recipe is near perfect, we wanted to make it a bit more substantial and filling as a meal in and of itself, hence the addition of farro. We also used homemade sourdough for the breadcrumbs, added barberries, and tweaked the process a little bit (adding the cheese separately versus mixing it all together makes for more even distribution and less clumps). Also, twice as much cheese and garlic (as you do).

This recipe works with any kind of kale; the original calls for lacinato (the darker, dino-skin looking stuff); we used curly kale here since I love the texture and lift: it doesn’t collapse under the weight of the farro.

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