After the nut milk is made, you soak the bread for an hour. Then you dehydrate it for about four to six hours on one side, flip it over, and dehydrate it for four more hours on the other side until it’s slightly crispy.
That’s at least 10 hours of dehydration time and nut milk preparation. If you’re serving it with candied walnuts, those also need to be dehydrated, for at least 12 hours. In total, that’s 22 hours of dehydration time. The rest of the prep is generally blending different nut milks and soaking or chopping nuts.
Many of the recipes in Kenney and Melngailis’s cookbook, as well as some of the other popular raw food books like Charlie Trotter and Roxanne Klein’s Raw and Matt Amsden’s RAWvolution call for long lists of exotic ingredients and expensive equipment. It does the home cook well to remember that these books feature five-star food that happens to be made at home. While it’s fun if you’re feeling ambitious, raw food need not be so complicated and not all recipes require such devotion; Raw Food, Real World includes an arugula salad with pear, spiced pumpkin seeds, and Meyer lemon dressing that can be prepared in a matter of minutes if you leave out the pumpkin seeds.
Full-Throttle Juicing
If you’re interested in trying raw food, an excellent place to start is Sunfrost Farms in Woodstock. The market and eatery has an excellent juice bar and sells shots of wheatgrass juice to go. Matthew Ballister, the owner of Sunfrost, is the son of Barry Ballister, who founded the business in 1972.
“We’ve had the juice bar the entire time,” says Matthew Ballister. “My father spent winters in the Yucatan and they had liquado stands there. He enjoyed the mangos, papayas, and avocados and wanted to sell them. He special-ordered mangos, and in the beginning could barely get through a case, so he created the Mango Crema [one of Sunfrost’s smoothies] to move excess product. The Papaya Maya was created the same way. We’re talking about live food, separating out the unnecessary part, the pulp. What remains is sweet, sipped, social, and pretty.”
Supposing you want to try making raw food. You’ll need a blender. Devotees swear by the Vita-Mix. It’s the Harley-Davidson of blenders—goes forward, reverse, and vroom, vroom, vroom. You can crush ice, coffee beans, and probably beer cans with it. But you’ll never get as fine a puree with a home blender as you will at a juice bar, so you may not want to drop $400 on a Vita-Mix. And you’ll also need a juicer or access to fresh juice, plus a dehydrator if you’re really going full-throttle.
One key raw juice ingredient is agave syrup, a natural sweetener extracted from the same munificent cactus that gives us tequila. Like maple syrup, agave comes in light and dark versions. It has a lower glycemic index than sugar or honey, which means you don’t have the blood sugar peaks and valleys.
Organic Nectars, started by former marketing consultant Lisa Protter and former TV sound engineer Steve Trecasse, sells both light and dark agave as well as raw cacao powder, dried goji berries, and chocoagave syrup, an unctuous, pure chocolate, one-way ticket to nirvana. It’s roughly 50 calories per tablespoon and full of antioxidants. Banana slices or strawberries dipped in chocoagave make an effortless dessert. Milk from young Thai coconuts, the kind with the pointy tops, are used to make smoothies and soups, while the flesh is used for noodles, “ice cream,” puddings, and other dishes. Nama Shoyu, an unpasteurized soy sauce, is also a staple.
Going Goji
A cold day in early February found me in a West Hurley kitchen with cayenne-colored walls, massaging extra-virgin olive oil into kale. I did so at the behest of vegan and raw foods chef Roni Shapiro, in an attempt to learn more firsthand. Unbeknownst to her, kale, and its first cousin cauliflower, are the monsters under my culinary bed. I fear them. Deeply.
Shapiro hands me a glass with water and goji berries in it. Goji berries resemble small, reddish prunes. The antioxidant darling of the Himalayas, goji berries are allegedly responsible for everything from eternal youth to high sperm count. Even Dole has jumped on the goji berry bandwagon, distributing Tibetan sun-dried goji berries.
“No one food is everything,” Shapiro says. “But goji berries are one of the fun things that the raw foods movement has hooked into and found to have all of these neat benefits.”
