Authors: Charlie Cascio
Esalen Cookbook (4 page)
NOTES ON COOKING
In this cookbook, I recommend using dehydrated cane juice rather than refined white sugar. Refined white sugar is bad for the body. Sucanat or dehydrated cane juice can be directly substituted for it. Sucanat is a natural sugar that contains the minerals and vitamins needed for your body to digest the sugar.
Refined white sugar is unnatural and unhealthy for the human body. It has absolutely no food value. In addition, it has been stripped of the alkaline minerals that are needed to digest sugar. Unrefined sweeteners have a natural balance of sugar and alkaline minerals. These types of sweeteners don’t stress the body or upset its natural harmonious balance like refined sugars do. Refined sugars have a jolting impact on the stomach. The blood must maintain a neutral Ph balance. However, when you eat refined sugars, they immediately turn the blood Ph acidic. The body must strip alkaline minerals, especially calcium and iron, in order to balance the blood Ph. This stresses the pancreas to produce more insulin to regulate the blood sugar before the whole body is traumatized.
Refined sugar, no matter what color it is, will always be in a granulated “crystal” form. In commercial powdered sugar, the crystals have been ground; in commercial brown sugar, the crystals have been colored with molasses or caramel. If the sugar is in granulated crystal form, it’s refined.
There is on the market natural, organic sugar that claims to be dehydrated cane juice. This is half true, because all refined sugar from sugar cane has had the water boiled out of it as one of the first steps of refining—at this point it is dehydrated cane juice. After that, however, the healthy minerals and vitamins are also refined out. These minerals and vitamins are instrumental in digesting and assimilating the sugar cane juice into the body. Don’t be deceived by healthy-sounding names like “raw sugar,”“cane sugar,”“turbinado sugar,” or “fructose sugar.” They are all denatured, highly refined sugars and are just as unhealthy as refined white sugar. Fructose sugar is not from fruit as the name implies, but is made from highly refined corn syrup. Turbinado sugar gets its name from the process used to refine and denature the sugar. Raw sugar has had the bleaching process eliminated, but is also denatured. All these sugars are just as harmful to the body as the white refined variety.
Except when the author of an original Esalen recipe insisted that I use refined sugar, I have substituted evaporated cane juice for refined sugar throughout this book. Evaporated cane juice goes under the brand names of Sucanat and Rapunzel’s Rapadura.
Back in the early ‘90s, I attended the BioFach Organic Trade Fair in Frankfurt, Germany. This is the largest organic trade fair in the world. Growers, manufacturers, and suppliers of organic food and cosmetics from all over the world gather in Frankfort every year to display their merchandise and to make contact with one another. I was in charge of a booth for a friend of mine who owned an organic bakery in France.
My neighbor in the booth next to me was representing the country of Bolivia, displaying organic quinoa, the grain of the ancient Incas. In the booth on the other side of me was a Brazilian company called Sucanat. I had studied the effects of refined sugar on the human body, and I was fascinated to discover that this product was pure sugar cane juice that has had the water evaporated out at low temperatures. All of the god-given minerals and vitamins that lived in the sugar cane at the time of juicing are there—no refining had taken place. This really was raw, unadulterated, unrefined, and unbleached sugar.
Sucanat has one advantage over other natural sweeteners. It can be substituted in recipes calling for white refined sugar on a one-to-one basis. Other natural unrefined sweeteners such as maple syrup or honey are in a liquid form, and the recipe must be changed to accommodate the extra liquid.
Dehydrated cane juice has a brown color and is in the form of uncrystallized granules. When you dilute dehydrated cane juice with water it tastes just like fresh-squeezed sugar cane juice. It has a pleasant mild flavor that balances and entices other flavors to come forward. I highly recommend incorporating this into your cooking.
COOKING OILSOil is a very important factor for health. In this cookbook, I have simply stated “vegetable oil” or “olive oil” in the recipes. It’s important to use unrefined and naturally extracted oil for your salads and cooking needs.
Go into a modern American supermarket and all the vegetable oils on the shelf—except one—will have no color, no order, and no taste. All these oils have been super-refined, stripped of their nutrients, bleached, and deodorized. Most of the oils on your grocer’s shelf have been extracted from the base seed or nut through the use of chemical solvents, which have destroyed the nutrients in the oil. This is why there is no taste, no smell, and no color in the oil. This type of oil is a source of nutrient-deficient calories, similar to sugar, but unlike sugar, the oils are loaded with indigestible toxins that the body will have to store, mostly as fat.
The only exception on the grocery shelf is extra-virgin cold-pressed olive oil. This is guaranteed unrefined oil and is the healthiest choice in the supermarket. And it will be the only oil on the shelf that has odor, taste, and color. At one point in their lives all the oils on the grocery shelf had these same qualities, but by industrial refining processes, manufacturers have destroyed their integrity.
In natural food stores you can find unrefined oils that still hold their integrity, but be sure they say “unrefined” on the label because a lot of natural food stores sell the same nutrient-deficient oils as your local supermarket. No matter how many natural, low-cholesterol, or other healthy-sounding messages are written on the bottle, if it is not marked “unrefined” on the front label of the bottle, it’s been robbed of its nutrients.
If an oil isn’t marked “expeller pressed,” it means petrochemical solvents (probably heptane or hexane) have extracted the oil. They are used because they extract more oil from the source, and we are told that these petrochemicals are refined out of the oil after the extraction. It has never been definitively proven, however, that all the solvent is taken out of the oil. Even in minute amounts, these solvents are highly toxic.
I suggest you use organic extra-virgin olive oil in the dishes you prepare. It is a health-enriching oil that has been shown to be beneficial against cardiovascular disease and cancer. It’s a fairly stable oil and can handle light sautéing, up to 300 degrees F. If you need to use oil in a dish for which the taste of the olive oil will not complement the recipe’s flavor, use an oil that is labeled “unrefined,” “organic,” and “expeller pressed.” Organic, unrefined safflower, sunflower, sesame, and rice bran oil can be found in natural food stores. I suggest that you use these when olive oil is not appropriate. These four oils are fairly stable and can handle light sautéing. For high heat or deep frying, I would suggest using ghee (clarified butter) or coconut oil, since they have a high heat tolerance to molecular breakdown.
SOURDOUGH STARTERIf you want to bake sourdough bread and don’t have a sourdough starter, you have three choices: (1) You can buy a dried sourdough culture, which can be found at your natural food store. (2) You can borrow a cup of starter from a friend (if you are lucky enough to have such a friend). Or (3), you can make the starter culture yourself. Believe it or not, making a sourdough culture is not rocket science. Here is an easy-to-follow recipe that will give you great results.
2 teaspoons active dry yeast
2 cups warm water
2 cups whole wheat flour or rye flour
Mix the ingredients in a glass, plastic, or ceramic bowl using a wooden spoon. Don’t use metal; it will react to the fermentation. Cover the bowl with a plate and leave at 65 to 70 degrees F (ambient room temperature) for 4 days or until small bubbles appear on the surface. The starter will smell like sourdough bread. Keep your starter in a glass or plastic jar or a ceramic crock and cover with a kitchen towel or loose-fitting lid.
If you use the starter every few days, it can stay at room temperature. If the starter is used less often, keep it in the fridge so its growth is slowed down. Try to keep at least 2 cups of starter active so you will always have a bit of old starter to replenish the culture. When you use the starter for baking, replenish the starter by stirring in the same volume that you have taken out, using equal parts flour and water.
STOCK-MAKING BASICSAll of the savory recipes in this book will taste good if you use water when they call for adding liquid. But to achieve excellent taste from soups and sauces, as well as from some of the lunch and dinner recipes, adding a stock base that you have made from fresh ingredients is the key.
Stocks are the basic foundation that flavor can build on. You make stocks by simmering meat trimmings, bones, vegetables, vegetable trimmings, and herbs in water. The first rule of stock making is to use fresh ingredients. Don’t use ingredients that belong in the compost! Stocks are not a way to use up everything that you were going to throw out when you clean the fridge.
Chop the stock ingredients into small pieces; about 1 inch will do just fine. Quantity is not an issue with stock making; more ingredients bring out more flavor. Start your stocks with cold, fresh water and cook vegetable stocks a minimum of 1/2 hour and a maximum of 1 hour. Meat stocks should cook a minimum of 1 hour and poultry stocks a minimum of 2 hours.
Strain the ingredients out of the stock when you’ve finished cooking; this will eliminate any chance of the stock turning bitter. Certain vegetables should not be used for making stocks because they will turn a stock bitter. These include artichoke trimmings, bell peppers, all of the cabbage family (cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts, and kohl rabi), turnips, and red beets. Also do not use any spoiled vegetables, ground herbs, celery seed, or salt when making a stock.
A good recipe for a basic stock is 50 percent onions, 25 percent carrots, and 25 percent celery with some parsley, thyme, and bay leaf added to this mix. But remember, you don’t have to follow a recipe to make a good stock.
A fresh stock base can be fortified by using a good-quality powdered soup and stock base. And if you don’t have time to make a fresh stock, I can recommend two dehydrated stock bases: one is Vogue Cuisine (
www.voguecuisine.com
) and the other is Rapunzel Vegetable Broth (
www.rapunzel.com
). Both of these use fresh organic vegetables and are low in sodium. All the other brands I’ve tried are too salty and don’t really have an interesting taste.
www.voguecuisine.com
) and the other is Rapunzel Vegetable Broth (
www.rapunzel.com
). Both of these use fresh organic vegetables and are low in sodium. All the other brands I’ve tried are too salty and don’t really have an interesting taste.
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