Raw Food Diet Recipes:
Cooking Without Heat

Make the best raw food diet recipes including raw food recipes for lunch and dinner ideas, snacks, raw chocolate and others by learning how to cook without heat. Click here to view my list of raw food recipes or read on to learn how to create your own raw food diet recipes by learning a few secrets from the chefs...

Three Tricks To Making Raw Recipes

1. Sugar, Acid, Heat and Salt

The four tastes to food are sweet, bitter, spicy and salty. As long as you fine tune your raw food diet recipe to include each of these tastes, raw food can taste just as good as cooked food. Use the following examples as a reference.

Sweet: Dates, orange juice, fruits, agave nectar, honey, raisins

Sour: Lemon, lime, grapefruit, wine

Spicy: Garlic, cayenne, jalapeno, ginger, horseradish, arugula

Salty: Celery, carrots, tomatoes, kelp, nori

2. Creating Texture

When making raw food diet recipes, your goal is to mimic the texture and appearance of the foods you are recreating while maintaining the integrity of the nutrients in the ingredients. The methods used to do this are blending, juicing, dehydrating, soaking and sprouting.

Blending food will allow you to recreate foods like milk, cheese, hummus, soup, mashed potatoes, marinara sauce, and anything that requires a smooth or liquid consistency.

Recipes that require fresh juice usually have a liquid consistency such as gravy, smoothies, sauces, soup, etc.

Dehydrating food is how many popular raw food diet recipes are made. By slowly cooking food at a low temperature the enzymes and nutrients are preserved but the water is removed. This allows us to make dense foods such as bread, crackers, french fries and cookies that would otherwise fall apart.

When using raw nuts, seeds, grains and sprouts you should soak and/or sprout them for each foods required length of time. This "awakens" these foods so that we receive all the nutrients they have to offer. Almonds, for example, should be soaked for eight hours but do not sprout, while kamut needs to be soaked for 7 hours and sprouted for 2-3 days. However, some recipes call for unsoaked ingredients. Pine nuts, for example, will make a creamier nut cheese if they are ground up dry.

Most raw food recipes are high in fat because nuts and seeds are very versatile and can used in many different ways. When you want to make something creamy, like soup or sauce, or something dense, like bread or pie crust, high fat foods are usually called upon. By soaking nuts and seeds and grinding them up in a food processor or blender you will have on your hands the staple of many raw food chefs. Raw oils, avocado, olives and coconut are also invaluable.

You can, however, learn how to make low fat recipes by using ideas such as dehydrated vegetables in place of nuts and seeds, fresh juice rather than olive oil and lettuce wraps instead of bread.

3. Kitchen Equipment

Blenders and food processors can pretty much be used interchangeably but food processors are helpful for dry ingredients. A Vitamix blender is expensive, but a worthwhile investment for making raw food recipes. It is a high powered blender that can even grind up a block of wood if you so desire.

A large amount of raw food diet recipes require a food dehydrator. Dehydrators take the water out of foods to recreate the texture and appearance of traditional recipes but without destroying enzymes because the food is slowly "cooked", often for ten hours, or more or less, at a very low temperature. You can purchase one at Sunfood . A 5 tray dehyrdrator costs around $160 but you may want to buy one with more trays if you plan on making recipes in bulk.

A spiralizer is used to make spaghetti out of foods like zucchini and carrots. This is one of the easiest raw food recipes and a spiralizer is fairly inexpensive at around $30.

A nut milk bag is useful if you want to make juice. You can blend anything -vegetables, fruits, nuts, etc.- and pour the mixture into the nut milk bag over a bowl or glass. It essentially works as a colander. This is great if you want to make juice but do not want to purchase an expensive and messy juicer.

Simple Can Be Best

Raw food recipes can make all the difference in being able to stay on a raw food diet so start experimenting and find your own favorite recipes. In my experience it is best to start with simple raw food diet recipes such as smoothies, salads, soups and "pasta" and then work your way up to the more complex raw food cuisine such as tacos and pizza, which require more prep work and the use of a food dehydrator.

If you are as lazy as me you may rarely feel the urge to make anything beyond salads and smoothies. It is interesting how good these simple meals can taste after your taste buds have become awakened again. For me, the greatest thing about the raw food diet is the simplicity of the recipes and the abundant spare time you gain as a result.

Use Caution: Raw Does Not Always = Healthy

Note that not all ingredients, such as garlic, onions, hot peppers, oils, vinegar and raw chocolate, are healthy foods, but for those just starting a raw food diet they are acceptable transition foods.

Also, a good number of raw food recipes you may come across call for Nama Shoyu, which is unpasteurized soy sauce. Indeed it adds great flavor to raw food diet recipes but it is very high in salt at 720 milligrams of sodium per tablespoon! That is a dangerous amount of salt to be ingesting and I recommend to never use salt, let alone this product.

Additionally, use caution that you are not eating too much fat, as many of these recipes call for the use of nuts and seeds, coconut, raw oils and avocado.

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