When you wake up in the morning and it is -16 outside with a prospect of a high that day of -8, the idea of never eating any heated foods is an especially hard sell. However on the coldest day in the past 11 years we were enjoying a delicious raw recipe for lunch, it can be done, it is just a matter of will or should or why.
When all raw is not being done, how best go about it, that is my question! With countless kinds of foods and many creative ways to heat foods there is not one simple answer. Instead there are smatterings of bits of information gathered and “harvested”.
So if we are going to heat how do we heat gently and to the right foods whose molecules can handle it best. It seems possible that science hasn’t finished researching this. Just learning how any molecules interact with us is a challenge, then we would like to know how negatively affected compromised ones interact. Unfortunately or maybe fortunately for you I have very limited knowledge of biochemistry. And so I am forced into generalities and relying on other peoples research of which I know very little at this point.
There are claimed to be a number of ways to heat food doing the least damage, depending on the food. Oils seem to be among the most volitale and do least well. Think the curse of transfats. If you are heating oil the strongest one is coconut oil (see my Udo Erasmus book review).
In general for most of our vegetables think steam, that is obvious. And blanching, pour hot water over and let sit. Although it wasn’t obvious to me that if I want potatoes I can steam them the way one does broccoli and it works great! In fact it is very fast if you cut the potatoes into little cubes you will be looking at just a few minutes of steam. I am sure there are more subtle details about this process! I don’t know them yet!
Then there is the world of the dehydrator…this is the raw foodist’s “oven”, check one out
here
The best I think is the Sausagemaker model D5 and that one is not shown in the above chart.
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