Deliciously Raw - Feast and Taste Courses

Is raw food better?

Patrick is back at Deborah Durrant's raw food school in Gloucester right now. Find her at deliciously-raw.uk. We did the Feast course, which is entry level, together in October. Now Patrick is taking the next step and doing Taste.

Patrick's raw Asian soup

Both courses run Monday to Friday. You have to have done Feast to do Taste. On the Feast course Deborah taught us raw food basics such as raw pasta and gnocchi, sauces and custards, raw cheese and yogurt, new takes on a salad, granola, cacao truffles, breads and crackers, vegetable fermentation, nut milks, raw pizza and raw cookies.

Patrick's smoked root vegetables

I cannot say enough how valuable this course was to me. And no I am not plugging it or connected to Deborah in any way. My diet has been vegetarian since 1981. I wouldn't know how to prepare meat anymore. But the switch to vegan in 2012 has been hard.

Raw chutney, curried pickles, cold pickles and kimchi

I miss cheese. They say it gets easier and it does. I swerve past the Philadelphia cream cheese and aged Parmesans. Instead I head for the deli counter where I buy hummus and dairy free pestos. We also discovered Tofutti at our local Spar which is great vegan cream cheese alternative.

Patrick's raw beetroot toast with horseradish cream

The problem with a lot of vegan alternative foods though is they are still processed. They come with Palm oil, preservatives, flavourants and other E numbers. I don't want that stuff in our food. And that is where raw food steps up to the plate. It is minimally processed and uses only fresh natural flavours. I need to get over my desperate need to healthy everything up. A bit of natural sweetener like maple syrup, smoked Himalyan salt or a fat like coconut oil does help improve the flavour of food

Cacao panna cotta

Eating raw appears to be a whole lot of work but actually it's not. If you take a few hours to do all the prep work, you have most of your food ready for a week. Remember you don't have to wait for any of this to cook or heat it up? Once it's chopped and plated, it's ready!

Patrick's salad

But I will admit, if driving via the Golden Arches and collecting your meal in a brown bag or popping a ready-meal into the microwave  is your thing then making a salad is a bit more of a schlep.

Summer rolls

Taste is geared toward gourmet dining and they are learning techniques such as cold smoking, cold pickling, sous vide and elegant slicing. Patrick takes a zillion photos so I can see what they have been doing. I shared some of pics here and I can't wait to try some of these recipes when he gets home.

Hopefully we will be making these for other people soon.