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July 9, 2010
Author piles on flavors
“Raw” means more than salads, smoothies.
BAILA LAZARUS
Growing up with Jewish cooking, desserts were always a mainstay at evening meals, especially Friday night. The cakes and cookies section has always taken up the most room (and the most calories) in my recipe box: cinnamon sticky buns, coffee cakes and brownies, not to mention holiday recipes for hamantashen, honey cake and mandelbroit. Desserts meant baking, and that was that. So when a friend suggested we stop into the book signing and demonstration by raw-foods writer Jennifer Cornbleet, more than one eyebrow on my face headed northward. But after attending the demo and digging into a bowlful of her classic fresh fruit tart, not only did I start to view raw desserts from a new perspective, I had to go back for seconds.
Cornbleet has effectively taken away the challenge of making raw foods accessible for those people who want to eat healthily but are intimidated by an unfamiliar cuisine.
She became interested in healthy diets when she was very young, becoming a vegetarian at age 10. She began a raw foods diet when a yoga instructor suggested it to her. She’s currently a faculty member at the Living Light Culinary Arts Institute in California, a frequent guest on TV cooking shows and gives demonstrations around North America.
“I saw how changing to an unprocessed diet made a big difference in how I felt,” she told a crowd gathered at Barbar-Jo’s Books to Cooks in May for the book signing and demonstration. “And it’s so colorful, there’s so much variety; it’s really wonderful.”
Cornbleet’s first book, Raw Food Made Easy, addresses basic issues, from setting up your kitchen to what knives and cutting boards to use. It explains how to store, soak, ripen and clean raw foods, and it does away with complex machinery like dehydrators. Pretty much all you need to get started is a good food processor and a blender.
Cornbleet wanted to focus on easy recipes of one or two servings, which still had ample flavor, color and texture. Recipes for zucchini pasta el pesto, papaya lime soup and Califonia rolls dispel the myth that raw food is all about salads and fruit smoothies.
One of the advantages to raw foods, Cornbleet said, is that many dishes can be made in under 30 minutes because there’s no cooking time and less of a need for exact measurement. It’s also a great solution for those avoiding flour, gluten, dairy or sugar, and it’s a simple way to keep kosher.
Cornbleet’s second book, Raw for Dessert, the focus of the book signing, answered her own question, “Could all our favorite desserts be made with natural, unprocessed ingredients and still taste just as good?”
Using agave rather than sugar, and doing away with hydrogenated oil and saturated fats, Cornbleet gave her audience an idea of what a healthy dessert can taste like.
“I think of it as a magical world because you don’t have to be a masterful chef to make great desserts,” she said.
The book includes anything you’d need to satisfy the toughest sweet tooth and impress guests at a meal, including chocolate ganache, fruit trifle, pumpkin pie and ginger spice cookies. For hot summer evenings, there’s grapefruit granita, orange sorbet and even chocolate-chip ice cream with caramel sauce.
Mainstay ingredients are nuts, coconut, dates, vanilla and agave syrup, which, depending on how they’re combined, can imitate everything from shortbread to crème brûlée.
As a testament to her desire that her food tastes like the real thing and doesn’t have people running to the nearest Cinnabon or Ben and Jerry’s, Cornbleet does hundreds of taste tests. She tested 200 recipes for the ice cream alone, to get the right consistency between iciness and creaminess, she said. She even claims that her chocolate sorbet tastes more chocolaty because there is no fat to dilute the flavor.
Excuse me while I go and test the theory.
Baila Lazarus is a freelance writer, painter and photographer. Her work can be seen at orchiddesigns.net.
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