If you’ve ever heard of the area’s “life-changing” scone, this is it, according to many of its admirers. One fan put it this way, “I don’t really like scones. I don’t like kale. I hate raisins. This scone has kale and raisins. And it’s amazing … I don’t know what kind of alchemy they do to make these work, but they do.”
This scone has been on the menu at Broken Tart, 1108 Chicago Ave., since day one. When the bakery opened in 2022, owners and sisters Krissy and Katie Mack were unsure what the demand would be for their kale scone.
“That first day, we made like 20 of them,” Krissy Mack said. “That was it, and we’re like, that should be great.”
“Now, we’re probably close to 150 a day,” Katie said. “On the weekends, way more! All days, when it’s busy, we keep throwing them in the oven.”
What goes into them? Dry ingredients are straight-forward: flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, pepper.
High-quality European butter is first chopped and frozen before it’s added to the mix. Next comes cheese and raisins.
“We use Hook’s two-year aged white cheddar for these,” Krissy Mack said. “We like to cut them into big cubes. This is what gives us those big, like crunchy, kind of cheesy, crispy edges. We’ve got a little bit of pecorino cheese in there. It adds a little bit of saltiness to the scone. We use golden raisins, which we hydrate a little bit in hot water. If they’re super dry when you put them in, they burn.”
Last in is kale that has been washed, dried and coarsely chopped. Buttermilk binds all the ingredients together.
“It’s a shaggy dough,” Krissy Mack said. “You just want to roll onto itself and get all those little dry bits on the bottom.”
“Initially, it was just a flavor that we liked,” Krissy Mack said.
“This is our best seller,” Katie Mack said. “People are like, ‘Ugh.’ And I’m like, ‘Just try it. If you don’t like it, I will give you something else.’ I’ve never had somebody come back, ‘Yeah, I did not like it.’”