BENGALURU: My culinary journey has been exciting, fun, and rewarding to help people feel better, and create a world that is kind to animals and the environment. I became vegan more than 11 years ago, and developed a passion for raw foods about seven years ago.
Raw food preparation is different from traditional cooking in many ways, as heat causes flavours and textures to change, as well as meld together. So with raw food, it’s important to learn how to pair flavours together, as they won’t usually mix together into one flavour. I’ve learned that it’s also better to capitalise on what’s unique and better about raw ingredients – that is the freshness of its flavours and textures. A lot of raw food recipes try to replicate cooked food. Instead, I like to highlight raw flavours in the best way possible.
It would be really difficult to pick just one unique ingredient that I enjoy working with. But if I have to, it would be raw cacao butter. It has such a delicious flavour and wonderful aroma, and takes any dessert from being great to spectacular.
Raw cacao butter is different from cocoa butter, which is heated. Raw cacao butter is gently processed, and can never reach 47.8 C. It is rich in antioxidants and health-promoting compounds. Cacao butter is the butter from the cacao pod. It is rich, smooth, and fragrant. Fine chocolate bars get their texture and a lot of their distinctive flavour from cacao butter. That delicious melt-in-your-mouth property of good chocolate is due to cacao or cocoa butter.
While cacao butter is usually used to make chocolate bars, candies, and hard-shell toppings, I like to experiment with it in different dishes where it is not usually used. I like to experiment with it in raw vegan ice creams and cheesecakes. Where chocolate often clashes with fruit, especially acid fruits such as mango, cacao butter with fruits can be a divine marriage.
I made a raw tamarind-lime cheesecake with cacao butter. It worked very nicely. Mango cheesecake is a variant of this recipe, and I knew it would work well, because raw tamarind and mango are both slightly tart in addition to sweet. The cacao butter rounds out the tartness. This recipe is a hit!
But it’s not easy to work with cacao butter. It solidifies very quickly, so I have to work fast. I also needed to find a way to make sure that it blended into the batter nicely. I’ve learned to get around these issues by first melting the cacao butter and leaving it in a bowl over a pot of hot water. Then, I slowly add in all the other ingredients one by one, and blend in between. This yields a smooth and well-made dish.
– Chef Sulinya
The chef will organise a Radiant Raw Vegan Workshop At Carrots Restaurant today at 4 pm.