June 2008: Raw Revolution
Having already gained a following in the US, raw food is creeping on to menus in the UK and development chefs should take note of its growing popularity and health credentials
When it comes to creating raw cuisine, erase your mind of everything you know about cooked food, says raw chef Chad Sarno. “Aside from a classic knowledge of flavours and spice combinations, nothing is the same. Cooked food has a base already; for example pasta, potato or meat. With raw food you need to create a base, which must include fat, acid and sweet elements, then create flavours with herbs and spices. The technical side of recipe development is completely different.”
As well as establishing his own raw food restaurant consultancy in the US, Sarno is the brains behind the menu at SAF, believed to be London’s first raw and vegan restaurant, which opened in April this year. Although new to the UK, SAF – which stands for ‘simple authentic food’ and translates to ‘pure’ in Turkish – is a restaurant concept already proving a success in Turkey and Germany where LifeCo, the ‘raw lifestyle’ company behind the London opening, owns three restaurants and a quick service outlet.
Sarno has overseen the opening of each restaurant and brings all that experience to the Shoreditch based venture. While the vegan menu is littered with recognisable terms from beetroot ravioli to cauliflower risotto, a closer look reveals the use of intriguing ingredients such as macadamia ‘cheese’ and hemp praline and around 80% of the menu is raw.
A theatre style kitchen dominates the 90 cover restaurant, where the chefs plate up the delicate creations in full view of diners. “It’s fine dining in terms of the quality of service, knowledge of the staff and quality of product coming out of the kitchen,” says Sarno.
All produce is carefully sourced with the priorities of “local and organic, then local, then organic if possible”. Even the drinks menu has good credentials. “We have a ‘green’ bar concept, where our sommelier and mixologist Joe McCanta has hand sourced organic, biodynamic wines and hard to find spirits,” explains Sarno.
Everything is made in house, from the syrups in the bar to the sauces in the restaurant: “Nothing is bought in prepackaged”. For the considerable mise en place required, there is a large production kitchen downstairs, yet there is just one conventional oven in the whole restaurant. Instead, six food dehydrators, which Sarno refers to as his “raw ovens”, are used to prepare the majority of the food.
The dehydrators keep the food at a temperature of 48ºC, a requirement of raw food ensuring enzymes remain intact. “Take for example an apple. In its natural state, it is a complete package containing its own enzymes that our bodies can use when digesting it,” explains Sarno. “Cooking above a certain temperature destroys these enzymes, which means our bodies have to dip into their own limited supply of enzymes during the digestion process.”
So by eating raw food the body can save its own supply of enzymes for other things, such as fighting bacteria and disease. Cooking also destroys the natural minerals and vitamins in food.
While the temperature rule varies by a few degrees depending on which expert you talk to, the health benefits of a raw diet are the same principles being adopted in several corners of the globe. For example, Raw – one of the four restaurants at luxury resort Huvafen Fushi in the Maldives – is dedicated to raw cuisine.
While citing 42ºC as the highest temperature raw food should be exposed to, the restaurant demonstrates an equally fresh and innovative use of produce. The resort’s new executive chef Joseph Nagy has just overhauled the menu, having taken over from its previous ‘well being’ expert who initially created the concept.
“It’s been my first dabble in raw cuisine,” says Nagy. “I wanted to keep the dishes simple so we don’t scare people, but didn’t want to deviate too much from the raw concept.”
His menu demonstrates how the raw rules can be bent in order to cater for all tastes. “Sometimes raw food can be too serious. I didn’t want to take away the creativity of developing dishes so we just had fun coming up with presentable dishes that wouldn’t alienate certain guests – men especially can find the concept of raw food a little off putting.
“It’s been a good challenge. We’ve had to be very careful with the wording – we try to use familiar menu terms such as ravioli kholrabi. Dishes need to sound healthy but simple, while leaving room for surprise from the visual aspect.” His chefs use bread provers instead of food dehydrators, and benefiting from the Indian Ocean location, a lot of the dishes incorporate seared or marinated fish.
Dishes such as chilled beetroot soup with goat’s cheese sit alongside carpaccio of avocado and white reef fish. Inspiration has also been taken from traditional Maldivian dishes such as mashuni – a mixture of dried tuna, coconut, chilli and onion. “We serve mashuni with a twist, which consists of seared Yellowfin tuna wrapped in kuhlufilla (a Maldivian leaf, similar to spinach) with breadfruit, lime and rihaakuru (a Maldivian fish based condiment) dressing.”
Back in London, the freshness and healthiness of raw cuisine is also giving chefs food for thought. Mark Page, head chef at the capital’s Commonwealth Club, has introduced a range of raw dishes to his summer menu, which he says not only suit the hot summer months, but cater to people’s well being. “I have been interested in the raw food movement for quite a while and had so many recipes floating around in my head,” says Page. “Summer seems to be the perfect time to include the items on the menu and raw options can make conference delegates more productive and stop that afternoon sluggish feeling.”
Dishes include iced red pepper gazpacho; home cured duck, parma ham and pineapple carpaccio; and beetroot cured halibut with shaved avocado.
Hoping to bring the concept of a raw diet to the masses, Raw Magic is a new cookbook focusing on raw superfood. Published by Rawcreation, it boasts more than 160 recipes using ‘supercharged’ ingredients such as raw cacao, goji berries, algae and maca.
“There is a revolution happening in our culture right now,” says the book’s author Kate Magic Wood, who has been a raw foodie for nearly 15 years and has already published several books on the benefits of raw diets. “Never before have we had access to such a wide variety of plant foods. Some of them we are accustomed to in different forms, like cacao; others have been around for a few decades now like spirulina. Some are widely known in their country of origin, but novel to the UK like goji berries; and others are new to us like purple corn. True superfoods really can transform you into a superbeing.”
Sarno uses many of these ingredients at SAF and agrees they can help people lead healthier lives. “I got into raw food initially for health purposes. Nutrition is the foundation but it’s now the innovation and creativity on the gastronomic side that pushes my mind.
“Raw food is new territory. With most cuisine you know that a particular combination of seasoning or textures has been done before at some point in history, but with raw food you know when you create a dish you’re the first to do so. It’s the most innovative cuisine out there at the moment, aside from molecular gastronomy perhaps.”
Mostly self taught, he admits to having learnt a lot through trial and error: “This will be my 14th restaurant opening – and not all of them have worked. I’ve opened four other raw/vegan restaurants and spent two years researching these ingredients and techniques.”
He says there’s a number of ways to make food taste cooked: “They’re all age old techniques, many from other cultures. People were dehydrating food 2,000 years ago by leaving bread in the sun; or pickling and pressing produce like Korean kimchi.”
A good example of how he creates different tastes and textures with raw food is his mushroom dish. “We make a purée from walnuts and mushroom, adding oils and pine nuts to give it a meaty quality. The purée is formed into a croquette, then dehydrated for six hours.” This mushroom ‘patty’ delivers a meaty taste and texture, and is served with king oyster mushrooms, which have been marinated in salt for several hours. “The salt opens up the pores of vegetables, especially mushrooms, so you don’t have to cook them. We just dehydrate them for an hour before service to warm them through and concentrate the flavour.”
As SAF is a vegan restaurant, no dairy produce is used, yet ‘cheese’ and ‘ice cream’ feature heavily on the menu, made possible using speciality techniques.
“The cashew cheese and cream is like a mother sauce for raw cuisine. There’s no dairy involved, but it’s made in the same way as cheese – by adding enzymes and cultures and allowing it to go through the culture process.”
Almond and macadamia cheese is made in the same way, and popular ‘cheese’ courses on the menu include almond cheese rolled in fennel pollen and candied pecans as well as a trio of cashew cheese served with sundried tomato, olives and crisp flat breads. The cheese mixes are also used as a base for desserts such as apple cheesecake, which is made of a coconut and lemon base with a sweetened cashew cheese top. “We use agave syrup – a sweetener from a cactus plant – which has the lowest glycaemic index compared to other sweeteners, and a really clean taste; similar to corn syrup.”
SAF’s dairy free ice cream also makes use of the ‘mother sauce’ incorporating a variety of ingredients to create flavours such as maca, which sits on the menu under the simple title of ‘superfood’, served with lucuma cookie and goji syrup.
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