Rawtarian Cuisine: The Final Frontier
Having lived in cities for most of my life, I have explored the various cuisines, from Nepalese to Moroccan, from Muslim Chinese to Ethiopian. And at this point in my life, there seems to hardly be any new haute cuisines to experiment with that don’t involve odd meats or bugs. So I was surprised to find that the most interesting cuisine I have stumbled upon of late uses only veggies: rawtarian.
There is indeed a philosophy to the rawtarian diet. It seems to involve adding the philosophies of veganism with the concept that food loses its nutrition when it’s cooked. Personally, I’ve read the opposite, that cooked food sometimes allows our body to more easily absorb the nutrients that exist in it, but I don’t pretend to actually know and it is not the philosophy of the rawtarians that interests me; it’s the innovative dishes the rawtarians are coming out with.
As always, when the normal routes to common cuisine are cut off, the creative find new paths to palatability and I have tried numerous succulent dishes from rawtarians, such as olive oil strawberry cake, red beet ravioli with a zesty lemon filling and a light sauce, and raw “taco” dishes with guacamole. Each one as fantastic and fresh as the next, but somehow made of things that look like they were cooked. What’s the secret?
Dehydrators.
Rawtarians “cook” using dehydrators, which heat food to a certain temperature to dry it out and make it crispy, but don’t cook it. It allows food to not need oil and to retain that wonderful fresh flavor of raw foods (and more nutrients). So, I decided to try out raw cuisine using the Excalibur 5-tray dehydrator.
The Excalibur models are generally square, and therefore unlike some round models of dehydrators, do not have a hole in the middle. The fan (a necessary part of the dehydrating process) is at the back and I found it to allow rather even drying across the trays. Even the relatively small 5-tray model is rather large and not for a small apartment with an already overloaded kitchen, so I’d make sure you’ll use it before purchasing. They also offer a 9-tray model for large families and even commercial two-zone models for folks who need to dehydrate mass amounts.
The first thing I tried with this dehydrator was kale “chips”. I chopped up kale and topped it with a faux “cheese” sauce, made of ground up macadamia nuts, lemon juice, nutritional yeast, hot peppers and cayenne pepper. The “chips” had a little difficulty fitting in their proper place, what with the height of the springy kale, but after strategic placement I was able to fit them in and came out with a crispy, super healthy, and yummy product that almost exactly copied what I had bought in Whole Foods the day before.
I tried other food experiments, including the red beet ravioli dish, which I found used some of the same ingredients for the “cheese” filling as the kale chips, but also required partially-dehydrated beets. All rawtarian desserts, which often require agave syrup it seems and can be quite fantastic, seem to require dehydrators to solidify them. But in additionally, I also decided to try the smorgasbord of usual things that dehydrators are used for. After trying to dehydrate several types of fruit, I found that mangoes are truly the best thing dehydrated — possibly better than their juicy originals. And of course, there’s beef jerky.
I’m not a huge jerky fan, but I must say that freshly made beef jerky is truly excellent. It is a HUGE project however, or at least my recipe was, and involves several steps of marinating, cooking and dehydrating before it’s done. At the end, the meat has shrunk greatly in size and the cost-benefit analysis is telling me that it would be easier (and possibly cheaper) to just buy high-quality jerky I really like.
Dehydrators also have the side effect of releasing the smell of the food in the air, much like cooking with an oven. Unlike an oven, however, the Excalibur dehydrator has large open gaps for the air to escape and thus the smell to follow it. Dehydrators need a certain amount of air circulation to properly dehydrate the food, but I have to wonder about the energy efficiency of such a device — after all the door does not fit on tight, but rather has large gaps on either loosely-held side. They claim in their useful FAQ though that the cost of electricity for the unit is about 4-5 cents an hour.
Overall, I found the Excalibur 5-tray to be a great size for the chef foraying into the dehydrating process and an overall solid machine. I was especially happy with the variable temperature, as “raw” cuisine is defined as below 104 degrees but, like ovens, several different temperatures are useful.
However, though raw cuisine is intriguing, it is also time consuming. Dehydrating often takes several hours or even a couple of days and though one doesn’t need to be present for the process, meals that involve dehydrators generally have to be planned in advance. I found the timer very useful for starting a part of the next day’s meal at night, as it could then just shut itself off when I was asleep and I could deal with it the next morning- you can get the 3500 model with or without the timer, and end up paying about $20 extra for it which is likely worth the extra cost. Nonetheless, it requires a certain amount of organization, I decided, to be a rawtarian.
And in case you’re wondering, sometimes those trays do get some food stuck to them. They can be taken out and washed separately, but not always easily.
The Excalibur 3500 Deluxe Series 5 Tray Food Dehydrator is available through Amazon without the timer, and directly from the manufacturer with it, for about $200.
