RAW BAKLAVA

This Raw Baklava Recipe is from Juliano’s Book Raw -Uncook Book

Ingredients have been converted from US to Metric

3 cups OATS

2 cups PITTED DATES

FILTERED WATER for soaking dates and oats

1/4 cup maple syrup or honey

1 cup RAW PECANS

1 tsp MACE

2 cups raw WALNUTS AND ALMONDS coarsely chopped

Soak the oats and dates in separate containers with enough water to cover for 2 hours. Drain.

In a Super Blender combine oats and maple syrup or honey and blend until creamy.

Spoon blender contents, about 3mm thick onto a solid Dehydrator sheet and dehydrate until crispy, about 6 hours.

Transfer oat crust onto a pie plate.

Set aside.

In a Food Processor (or Oscar Juicer), homogenize dates and pecans and spread a 2.5cm  layer of the mixture over the oat crust.

Evenly sprinkle one third of the walnuts, almonds and a pinch of mace of date-nut paste. Repeat the layering process until you’ve used all the date-nut paste, nuts and mace;

• it makes up to three layers

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PLANET RAW -CA- USA

Imagine visiting a planet where all the food was gourmet and Raw. Yes I mean as in not cooked! My family, meaning my husband Michael and twin daughters Tammy and Lisa enjoyed the pleasure of just that – a visit to PLANET RAW in Santa Monica, California,USA. Juliano and Ariel offer more than just Raw – they offer 100% Organic Raw Vegan. Quite a claim!

We were so keen to taste as many dishes as possible that we ordered 2 items of each course. So, we started with 2 warm soups and since raw food is So nourishing and satisfying that huge portions were not necessary. The soup however was so delicious that we could actually have fought over that last spoon. Then onto sushi and with a description like Mustard Toasted Eel who would think that was raw vegan?  Entrees included a green curry pasta made from zucchini pasta mixed with an amazing thai nut curry kream topped with coco-noodles and a Truffle kream linguini. I recall the one ‘pasta’ dish was topped with thin dried mango fruit leather ribbons that were tasty and colourful and added tp the contrasting texture of the dish. When it came to desserts, two just was not going to cut it so we went for 3. Chocolate mouse, cheese cake and velvet strawberry mouse. Pictures paint a 1000 words – take a look at this.

The menu is extensive and the dishes are colourful, magnificently presented and very tasty. In addition to the food Juliano and Ariel offer a large range of juices, smoothies, organic coffee and organic wine. The bill with the tip worked aout at R175,00 a head which was certainly not excessive for this handmade organic gourmet food in $.

To see more images go to Planet Raw in the Gallery -coming soon

for one of Juliano’s recipes from his book RAW – The Uncook Book go to: http://lifestyle4health.co.za/category/recipes/

The ins and outs of Food Dehydrators

There was, and I am sure is, still quite some controversy regarding the enzyme-safe temperatures for dehydrators and the necessity to shift trays when drying.

I did some investigation and also bounced the information off the manufacture of the Ezidri Manufacturers who were  in the past VERY associated with Excalibur in the USA. This is what I came up with.

It had been noticed that the Excalibur had problems with uneven drying and apparently  still do to this day regardless of what they say and you do really have to revert the trays during a drying cycle to obtain the quality of even drying.  Excalibur developed and patented the round version with the converger airflow where the clean air travels up the outside chamber of the unit and when the lid is placed on it pressurizes the air forcing it to flow through the small channel and across the tray of product and convect up and outside the unit. (Like the current Ezidri) Thus providing virtually clean air to each individual tray which the Excalibur can not do. It also does not also have the expanding capability of the Ezidri products.

Ezidri actually started manufacturing this patented unit under license in 1980. In 1995 Ezidri amicably parted company with Excalibur, retaining the patent rights to the converga flow system and made a number of improvements to end up with the current Ezidri models.

Kevin Anderson of Ezidri says “To achieve the ultimate in dehydration the cost of suitable equipment is horrendously expensive and the consumer pricing would be just entirely impractical, plus the many vagaries of thickness, moisture content, sugar content of the produce together with humidity, ambient temperature etc, we settled for as near as possible to supply a machine that would be able  to provide the very highest quality of dehydrated produce at an affordable level. We believe we have achieved this with the EZIDRI.”  We at Healthmakers agree with Kevin – it is a great product!

There was some further information obtained from Excalibur regarding temperature. In particular,  initial using  higher temperature to offset higher moisture content for a couple of hours and then to turn the temperature setting to a lower temperature for the rest of the drying period to produce a higher quality product. The problem with this is that people tend forget to turn it down. The other issue with drying is that sometimes you prepare e.g. crackers that do not require the entire night to dry and who wants to set alarm clocks to get up in the middle of the night to turn the dehydrator off. Well, Healthmakers has come to the rescue by supplying a timer with every Ezidri dehydrator so you can turn the dryer off after 4 or 5 hours and also turn it off for an hour if you have ramped it up to a higher temperature, giving you an hour to remember to turn it down (if you are the forgetful type).

Small Commercial Drying Enterprises
I was fortunate in obtaining some first-hand information about the Ezidri Ultra F1000. “The Ultra FD1000 is the very first model produced for many years and is really our flagship. It is by far the most superior and ‘Rolls-Royce’ of consumer dehydrators and is widely used in many commercial operations because of it’s accuracy and dependability and the expandable feature.

The Ultra model is really the only one that has this high degree of accuracy with our electronics, variance of + – 1% on the variable temperature control. The Snackmaker has a range of + – 2% on the settings, Low Med. High and the Classic, because of the metal thermostat pre-set at the factory to range between 40Co and 60Co – averaging around 55Co over a drying cycle, is not a unit we would recommend for the dedicated Dehydrator. Certainly the Ultra is the optimum unit. In fact very similar to your Juicer range, the very best is probably the most expensive and so it is with Dehydrators.

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