Cooking By Laptop

Here in Vancouver, we have a raw, vegan cafe called Gorilla Foods. Gorilla was the very first place in the city to exclusively serve vegan, raw foods. There are now more, of course, but Aaron Ash got in on the ground floor.

If you’ve never been, it’s a funky joint in the basement of an old office building on Richards street downtown.

Everything here is raw, organic and vegan, and that means that a lot of dehydration goes on. If you are unfamiliar with the raw food movement, it basically means that nothing is cooked above 180 degrees fahrenheit. It’s after food gets to that temperature that they start to lose their nutrients, so it’s thought that eating raw foods allows your body to absorb greater nutrition from your foods.

I’ve had Aaron’s cookbook (Gorilla Food: Living and Eating Organic, Vegan, and Raw) for years, but have been unable to try many of the recipes in there, because I haven’t had a dehydrator (I just got the Salton Collapsible Dehydrator, and I’ve been making all! the! things! in it). In raw cooking, the dehydrator basically replaces the oven. If you order a sandwich at Gorilla Foods, it will come on a slice of “bread” very similar to this.

The other thing I like about this recipe is that it uses up “leftovers.” When I’m making juice in my juicer, I just save the pulp (instead of composting it), and it becomes the base of this recipe.

I have been eating this all week, slathered with nut butter or hummus. To make a more elegant presentation, I would top this with Daiya Cream Cheese (or a cashew cheese if you wanted to make your own), thinly-sliced cucumbers, and a pile of sprouts.

Carrot Date Bread {Vegan, Raw, Gluten-Free}

Ingredients:

• 2 cups carrot pulp (leftover from making juice), or grate the carrots, place them in a cheesecloth, and wring well to get out any excess moisture
• 1 cup oatmeal
• 6 dates, pitted, chopped, and soaked in 1/2 cup of warm water for 30 minutes
• additional water
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 1/2 cup sunflower seeds

Method:

1. Place the oats into a food processor, and begin blending them on low speed. Slowly turn up the speed until it’s on high. You want to turn the oats into as fine a flour as possible.
2. Add the carrot pulp, dates (drain them first), and salt. Blend again until they are all nicely mixed together. Now, begin to add water slowly (through the hopper on your food processor), about a 1/4 of a cup, but maybe more, depending on how dry your mixture is. You want to add water until the “dough” becomes one cohesive ball.
3. Remove from the food processor and stir in the sunflower seeds.
4. Lay the “dough” out in an even layer, about 1/2″ thick, on one of the plates of your dehydrator. With mine, I used the herb tray–it has smaller perforations. You could also spread your bread on parchment paper in the dehydrator, but if that’s the case, make sure to flip it halfway through so it cooks evenly on both sides.
5. Dehydrate at 130 degrees for about 7-8 hours in total.