I was honoured to be a part of a Raw Chef Training with Raw Food Chef Rene Archner. This training was held in the beautiful Albany Lodge with 18 participants. It was a hands-on full immersion training, which meant a lot of blending, cutting, dehydrating, soaking and sprouting.
We’ve made over 57 recipes – all raw, healthy and nourishing. And yes we ate it all … Almost 😉 It included savoury and sweet raw recipes… I know, you say to yourself, raw can be savoury and delicious?! But then you’re eating only salads?! Wrong! We’ve made the most beautiful raw breads (they are dehydrated, made out of nuts or seeds), croutons, stir fry and soups. We created a rice-less sushi with a not-tuna salad and beautiful raw pizza with marinated onions.
We’ve learnt a lot! And I mean A LOT! From decorating, chopping and balancing flavours, with whom we created our very own masterpieces. As with cooked food there is a whole new philosophy with raw food. The right balance of different ingredients act together as a choir, with each voice barley distinguishable on it’s own. As Rene says “they merge together to become one harmonic cord.”
These raw voices are sweet, salty, sour, pungent, bitter, flavor enhancing herbs and spices. Each of the flavours are influenced by each other and all are supported by the patriarch of the family-fats. From here we learnt how important every fat carries the foundation for others to gather and form the choir.
Each group studied the importance of balance in raw cuisine, presentation and the enjoyment of feeding the emotional part of a person in a healthy way.
This was an absolute paradise to me! Educational, gourmet and healthy. Meeting likeminded people who also wanted to achieve a level of knowledge of being great raw culinary artists – did we make it? I think the pictures say it all.
I was also the main videographer there and soon you’ll be seeing a exclusive video report of our intensive training of the most delicious food you could ever taste! 🙂
