FOOD
Taking
the raw route
By William Rice
Chicago Tribune
07-30-2003 |
Raw foodism promotes life, not deprivation.
Witness the spiced ice cream. KRT Photo.
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Raw foodism promotes life, not deprivation. Witness
the spiced ice cream.
Raw! It’s a powerful word in the world of food.
When applied to dining, it sets off strong emotions
and evokes images of sparsely garnished plates, overly
crunchy vegetables and minimal seasoning. So it’s
a skeptical reporter who agrees to dine at Karyn’s,
a newly opened Chicago spa with two restaurants that
feature only raw food.
Owner Karyn Calabrese, the high priestess of raw food
in Chicago, passes a menu over the handsomely set table
with its unblemished white tablecloth and says to her
guest, “I hope you’ll try a mint julep,
then I want to order the ravioli, some crepes and a
pizza.” Across the room, in a separate casual
dining section, a sign bids diners to attack the “All
You Can Eat Organic Salad Bar.” The menu promises
a banana split for dessert.
Where’s the deprivation? It’s nowhere in
sight.
The julep arrives in a brandy snifter. It is light,
foamy, gently sweet—and without a drop of alcohol.
The guest nibbles a kale chip, then another.
“Crisp and intriguing,” he thinks.
“Good source of calcium,” Calabrese comments,
bringing him back to the reality of raw food and the
purpose of this Lincoln Park, Ill., spa’s dining
facilities.
“The basis of raw foodism is that life promotes
life,” Jeremy A. Safron writes in The Raw Truth,
the Art of Preparing Living Foods (Celestial Arts, $18.95).
“Food fresh from nature’s garden contains
a wide range of nutrients and a powerful amount of life
force. Raw foodists believe in living as closely to
the earth as possible and respecting all life.”
The raw food movement is gaining momentum locally.
It has inspired Calabrese to build her spa complex with
raw food restaurants. It has motivated
Jenny Cornbleet to teach raw food classes. And
it has persuaded Chicago chef Charlie Trotter to co-write
a cookbook called Raw in collaboration with California
restaurateur Roxanne Klein.
First some guidelines: When we say “raw food,”
we’re not talking about carrot and celery sticks,
though they may have a role in a raw foods diet. Nor
need we worry about the bacteria count of a serving
of tuna tartare. That’s because we are talking
about a diet that includes absolutely no animal products
and no ingredient that has been heated beyond 116 degrees.
Ah, then it’s a “vegan” diet? Not
exactly. While vegans restrict their consumption to
plant foods and refuse to eat anything “with a
face” or animal products such as milk and eggs,
they often cook food before consuming it. And vegetarians
consume all manner of cooked plant foods as well as
milk and eggs.
Raw foods are meant to create a more vibrant and energetic
you. Calabrese and others are convinced the best way
to achieve this is through making ingestion a pleasure,
not a pain.
“The idea of a raw foods diet scares people,”
she explains. “They fear they will be eating salad
with tomato and cucumber every day for the rest of their
lives. We want to help move the raw foods diet from
the scary category into the mainstream. That will not
happen if we can promise them no more than a diet of
salads.”
The offerings are expanding as some high-profile chefs
are discovering the virtually unexplored area of upscale
or gourmet raw foods. Now celebrities fly to San Francisco
to dine in suburban Larkspur at Roxanne’s on an
elegant, multi-course luxury-priced tasting menu, or
order a menu of raw foods at temples of fine dining
such as The French Laundry in the Napa Valley and Charlie
Trotter’s.
“I’m doing this for aesthetic reasons,
not for health,” Trotter says. “I took on
raw food as a challenge to produce beautiful, great-tasting
presentations and became really intrigued and excited.
Now it has reached a point where I think every serious
chef in the country needs to incorporate some raw food
dishes into his menu.”
Klein traces her interest in a vegetable diet back
to a California childhood punctuated with “incredible”
fresh organic produce from her grandparents’ farm.
As an adult, trained in French restaurants, she “loves
discovering the inherent sensuality of each ingredient
in its natural state” and combining them “to
stimulate all the senses” with the finished dish.
She estimates that no more than 10 percent of those
who come to eat her food are practicing vegetarians.
“People who make a sport of dining out are excited,”
she observes. “They haven’t had a whole
lot new since sushi.”
At Roxanne’s, as at Karyn’s, virtually
nothing prepared turns out to be what it appears to
be, nor is it made of traditional ingredients. Klein
uses terms such as “lasagna” and “pad
Thai” because, she says, it “helps guide”
diners when ordering. Karyn’s ravioli, for instance,
are made from turnips; ground cashews replace cheese
to add bulk to the sauce.
At Charlie Trotter’s, recipe titles are ingredient
lists. One evening, two raw dishes were described as
follows: “Burgundy carrots, salsify and white
asparagus with avocado puree and Perigord black truffle”
and “Golden beets with dill, daikon radish with
soy and yuzu, watermelon radish with chive and cucumber
with shallots and white wine.” The latter was
a glorious garden collection that took nearly as long
to read as to eat.
In Trotter’s and Klein’s new book, the
recipes with their gorgeous photos look challenging,
but Klein says they are doable for home cooks.
“We tried to show the possibilities of the ingredients,”
she says. “Home cooks may not necessarily be able
to re-create the presentation, but they still can make
the dish.”
Nutritionally, a “raw” diet ignites food
fights between those committed to it—a number
that appears to be increasing, though it remains unclear
how rapidly and to what level—and those who feel
it is excessively limited and unnecessary.
Raw foods devotees select from four segments: fresh
food, sprouted food, cultured food and dehydrated food.
There are two sub-groupings, sproutarians and fruitarians.
Semantically, raw food has fostered a new vocabulary
featuring a piggy bank (sorry) of coined words starting
with “UNcook” or (un)cook (the act of preparing
raw foods) and “living” (unprocessed) foods.
One area of common cause among the dietary dissidents
is support for organic foods and the farmers who grow
them.
“I avoid extremes,” says Suzanne Alexander
Ferrara, author of “The Raw Food Primer”
(Council Oaks Books, $19.95). “I think people
should eat things they love to eat, not obey a series
of commandments that fanatics use to determine who is
`raw’ and who is not.”
A raw foods tenet: When food is heated, it is chemically
altered and loses most of its ability to provide energy.
Eating food raw provides 100 percent of the nutrition
available to us.
The big factor is enzymes. These are “catalysts
which help us digest our food,” Safron writes
in “The Raw Truth.”
They “remain intact within living foods below
temperatures of 116 degrees (ideally 108 degrees),”
he adds. “Higher temperatures destroy the enzymes
and our bodies have to work harder to digest the foods
we consume.”
But that claim has become a major sticking point. The
newsletter Environmental Nutrition (EN) points out in
its May issue: “A flaw in this theory...is that
our bodies make their own supply of enzymes for use
in hundreds of metabolic reactions. We do not rely on
the enzymes in foods.”
The newsletter acknowledges the many benefits of a
raw diet: It is low in fat, cholesterol and sodium.
Nuts and seeds provide protein and monounsaturated fats.
“The diet has been linked to weight loss, lower
blood cholesterol, improved rheumatoid arthritis symptoms,”
EN continues, “though there is only limited research
to back the claims.”
Still, food safety experts warn of an enhanced danger
of food-borne illness from a diet of raw foods, especially
sprouts.
EN’s conclusion: “...eating a 100 percent
raw plant-based diet seems not only unnecessary, but
difficult to sustain (all that preparation and chewing)
for no real benefit. EN favors eating both raw and cooked
foods for a healthy balance.”
Ferrara recommends a gradual and comfortable transition
to a raw foods diet such as “starting the day
raw and going as long as you can” or “taking
one day a week to eat only raw food.
“There’s way too much all-or-nothing,”
she says. “The average person who starts this
diet may have only a couple of raw meals a week, but
the intense flavors get peoples’ attention and
makes them want to do more.”
“It is not a radical concept,”
Cornbleet adds. “Nutritionists around the world
agree that fresh fruits and vegetables should be an
essential part of people’s diets. Serving them
raw just highlights them and brings them to the center
of the plate.”
Cornbleet, a raw foods consumer for
five years, began teaching classes three years ago in
Chicago after getting certification from Living Light
Culinary Arts Institute in Ft. Bragg, Calif. She trains
apprentice teachers, home cooks and aspiring chefs.
She estimates that a third of her students are mainstream
cooks.
She compares her raw-food cuisine to
“casual Italian” food. “Both use few
ingredients but ones with vibrant colors and flavors,”
she said. “Raw food is simple and accessible.
It’s also so tasty that meat-and-potatoes folks
who are turned off by tofu and lentils love the stuff.
“What I teach does not depend
on high-end ingredients, and it’s easier to prepare
than standard food. There’s no heat in the kitchen,
no greasy pots and pans to clean.” The raw-foods
kitchen can be stove free, though there will be a sink
and a refrigerator. The (un)cook relies mostly on a
dehydrator, food processor and juicer.
“The dehydrator is easy to work with,”
says Ferrara. “Use it the same way you use a low-temperature
oven. You’ll find softer vegetables and more integrated
flavors than in an oven.”
In New York’s East Village, Dan Hoyt operates
his 24-seat raw foods restaurant Quintessence (there
are two others uptown) with a dehydrator, juicer, blender
and food processor. There’s no stove.
Hoyt attracts customers, 30 percent of whom are repeat
diners, some coming twice a day, by adding ethnic flavorings
to “fairly simple” combinations of ingredients
and offering original daily specials. Celebrities and
fashion models have found their way to his modest storefront.
He says the raw foods movement is “growing expeditiously.”
(David Wolfe, a leading spokesman for the movement,
told USA Today that he estimates “at least 1 million
people” follow some aspect of the raw foods diet.)
Hoyt is committed to the health aspects of a raw foods
diet, citing weight loss, overcoming disease and illness
and increased energy as “undeniable truths”
of what the diet can accomplish.
Ferrara adds that the movement believes that food should
be our medicine and we should spend more money on it
instead of giving it to doctors.
“There’s an awakening,” Hoyt says,
“especially among the aging Baby Boomers, to the
need to take care of our bodies to retain our good health.”
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Fresh NUT STUFFING FOR VEGETABLES
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Preparation time: 35 minutes
Soaking time: 2 hours
Yield: 2 1/2 cups
This recipe, adapted from Karyn Calabrese, makes a tasty
stuffing for mushrooms, celery, zucchini or cucumber
boats. Look for hemp oil and spirulina flakes at health
food stores.
1 cup each: sun-dried tomatoes, blanched almonds, pecan
halves
1 avocado, peeled, pitted
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tablespoons hemp oil, pumpkin seed oil or olive oil
1 teaspoon coarse salt
Spirulina flakes to taste, optional
1. Cover sun-dried tomatoes with warm water; soak until
very soft, about 2 hours. Combine almonds and pecans
in a large bowl and cover with warm water; let stand
until swollen, about 30 minutes.
2. Drain tomatoes and nuts. Combine tomatoes, nuts,
avocado, garlic, oil and salt in the bowl of a food
processor. Pulse 3 times; process until a semi-smooth
paste forms, scraping bowl occasionally, about 5 minutes.
3. Transfer paste to a bowl; refrigerate until ready
to fill vegetables. Sprinkle with spirulina flakes before
serving.
Nutrition information per serving: 57 calories, 77
percent of calories from fat, 5 g fat, 0.5 g saturated
fat, 0 mg cholesterol, 2 g carbohydrates, 1 g protein,
88 mg sodium, 1 g fiber
VEGGIE KEBABS
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Preparation time: 20 minutes
Marinating time: 1 hour
Yield: 10 kebabs
This recipe is adapted from “The Raw Truth, The
Art of Preparing Living Foods,” by Jeremy A. Safron.
Liquid aminos is an all-purpose seasoning made from
soy protein, sold under the Bragg label. Look for it
in health food stores or in the health food section
of supermarkets.
Marinade:
2 cups filtered water
1/4 cup each: liquid aminos, chopped cilantro
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
2 teaspoons olive oil
1 clove garlic, pressed
1/8 teaspoon each: paprika, chili powder
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Kebabs:
1 small pineapple, peeled, cut into chunks
1 onion, cut into cubes, separated into thin squares
1 large red bell pepper, seeded, cut into chunks
10 each: cherry tomatoes, pitted olives
1. Combine the marinade ingredients in a large resealable
plastic food storage bag; seal. Set aside.
2. For kebabs, thread fruit and vegetables on wooden
skewers, alternating to mix colors and flavors.
3. Place the kebabs in the plastic bag; turn to coat
with marinade. Marinate the kebabs for at least 1 hour,
up to 10 hours.
Nutrition information per serving: 48 calories, 20
percent of calories from fat, 1 g fat, 0.1 g saturated
fat, 0 mg cholesterol, 10 g carbohydrates, 1.8 g protein,
296 mg sodium, 1.5 g fiber
OLIVE-AVOCADO DIM SUM
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Preparation time: 20 minutes
Chilling time: 1 hour
Yield: 40 pieces
This recipe for seaweed-wrapped avocado filling is perfect
for appetizers. It’s adapted from a recipe from
Karyn Calabrese.
2 ripe avocados, peeled, seeded
1/2 cup each: chopped black olives, chopped onions
1/3 cup minced cilantro, optional
2 teaspoons each: ground cumin, chopped fresh ginger
root, minced garlic, minced jalapeno pepper
Juice of 1 lemon
10 sheets nori seaweed wrap, see note
Mix together all ingredients except nori; refrigerate
at least 1 hour. Meanwhile, cut each nori sheet into
4 pieces. Pleat pieces into muffin tins to form cups.
Fill each cup with about 11/2 tablespoons of the avocado
mixture.
Note: Nori sheets, made from dried seaweed, are most
well-known as a wrap for sushi. They are available in
Asian markets and Asian food sections in some supermarkets.
Nutrition information per serving: 20 calories, 71
percent of calories from fat, 1.8 g fat, 0.3 g saturated
fat, 0 mg cholesterol, 1.3 g carbohydrates, 0.3 g protein,
16 mg sodium, 0.6 g fiber
SPICED APPLE-COCONUT ICE CREAM IN GREEN APPLES
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Preparation time: 25 minutes
Chilling time: 2 hours
Freezing time: 3 hours
Yield: 5 servings
This recipe is served in martini glasses at Karyn’s
restaurant. Unsweetened flaked coconut is sold in health
and natural foods stores.
5 green apples
Juice of 1 lemon
1 1/2 cups honey
1 cup unsweetened flaked coconut
1 cup each: apple juice, unsweetened coconut milk
1/2 cup dried dates
1/2 teaspoon each: ground cinnamon, vanilla extract
1. Cut off tops of apples; brush with lemon juice.
Scoop out apple flesh with melon baller, creating a
bowl. Discard cores; brush inside of apples with 2 tablespoons
of the lemon juice. Place apples and tops, cut side
down, on a dish; refrigerate, uncovered, until ready
to use.
2. Place honey, flaked coconut, apple juice, coconut
milk, dates, cinnamon, vanilla and remaining lemon juice
in blender; process until smooth. Pour into container
of ice cream maker; freeze according to ice cream maker
directions. Transfer to freezer; freeze until solid,
about 3 hours. Fill apples with ice cream; replace tops.
Nutrition information per serving: 631 calories, 25
percent of calories from fat, 19 g fat, 17 g saturated
fat, 0 mg cholesterol, 125 g carbohydrates, 3 g protein,
18 mg sodium, 7 g fiber
BLUEBERRY DELIGHT
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Preparation time: 20 minutes
Yield: 6 servings
Fresh blueberries are topped with a healthful crumble
mixture in this recipe, adapted from one served at Karyn’s
restaurant. Look for ingredients in health food stores.
1 teaspoon each: almond meal, flax seed
1/2 teaspoon wheat germ
2 cups raw, organic cashews
1 cup spring water
1/2 cup organic maple syrup
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 pints blueberries
1. Combine almond meal, flax seed and wheat germ in
a small bowl; set aside.
2. Process cashews and water in a blender until almost
smooth. Add maple syrup and vanilla; process until smooth.
3. Divide blueberries among 6 bowls; sprinkle equally
with almond meal mixture. Top with cashew sauce to taste.
Nutrition information per serving: 420 calories, 50
percent of calories from fat, 25 g fat, 4 g saturated
fat, 0 mg cholesterol, 43 g carbohydrates, 10 g protein,
15 mg sodium, 4 g fiber
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