Raw

"Raw food is a very weird movement in vegan cuisine. It’s very tied to wellness culture and diet culture. Charlie Trotter had a famous restaurant in Chicago. Before 11 Madison Park was doing it, Charlie Trotter had a tasting menu option for vegetarians and vegans. Fine dining at the most expensive level has always had options for vegetarians and vegans, so you can find a lot of interesting techniques for vegetables and vegan ideas in the work of high-end fine dining chefs. Charlie Trotter put out a cookbook called Vegetables in 1996 which was all about using vegetables but would also use beef stock in a vegetable terrine. For Raw , he worked with Roxanne Klein, who is a California chef who went raw because of a trip to Thailand where she met Woody Harrelson, the actor. Anthony Bourdain makes fun of this book in one of his books, Medium Raw . But in this raw food cookbook written by two very hoity-toity chefs, you find a lot of techniques and interesting ways to approach things that you might otherwise not have thought of. It’ll tell you how to dehydrate, how to use cashews to make cheese etc. All of the technique with vegan cheeses that exists now really has its roots in raw food. It’s very vegetable-focused, which is great. You get a lot of new ways of doing things. Even if you’re not going to eat raw all the time, you can take technique from here. If you’re a home cook, you can find ways to do a dinner party with a nice vegetable terrine or new ways of using all the tomato, its skin and the tomato water. Or it will tell you how to use kohlrabi, which everyone gets in their CSA box in the fall and doesn’t know what to do with. If you want to go raw you can, but this book just provides another way of elevating technique with vegetables, doing yoghurt sauces from nuts or seeds or doing a sour cream made with cashews, that sort of thing. It provides a different way of thinking about the ingredients rather than a book that tells you ‘you should eat like this’. If you approach this book as a new way of thinking about ingredients it’s really, really interesting—like raw polenta with a wild mushroom ragout, which sounds bizarre but is really good. I love the portobello mushroom pave with white asparagus vinaigrette. Maybe you’re not going to do this at home, but it’ll give you a new idea for how to eat mushrooms, how to make desserts, how to approach all of these ingredients that you might have at any given time. This book was the most useful thing that came out of the raw vegan movement. Like Amanda Cohen, it’s a way of elevating your technique and taking vegetables seriously."