The Evolution of a Recipe
By Rhio

Have you ever prepared a raw dish from a recipe and then bit into it to find that the flavor fell a little short of your expectations? Sometimes the flavor is downright disappointing and you wonder why you spent all that money on good organic food to end up with this.

Other times you might feel that the flavor was almost there, but needed something. . . but what? You start thinking: What if I did this to it; would it taste better? Or, what if I used some different ingredients than the ones listed? Or what if I blended it and then added. . .

Welcome to the evolution of a recipe, or How to make a recipe your own.
The above scenario has happened to me so many times that I can almost look at a recipe now and know what it needs, at least to please my own taste.

When I was writing my book, Hooked on Raw, I had a lot of failures with recipes. It was not that they couldn't be eaten. They still contained good food, of course, but in order to put the best of the best into the book, I was very selective. I had a lot of recipes that I liked, but Leigh (he's my honey) wouldn't eat them. Then a funny situation occurred that led me to discover that people really have widely differing tastes.

I had made a dehydrated cracker that I thought was pretty good, but Leigh turned thumbs down on it a number of times. I thought "Well, Leigh is a pretty good judge of what people will like." But it just kept nagging at me that this was a pretty good cracker. I liked the taste of it, but I also like to eat raw turnips and potatoes, so I'm not really a good judge of what other people are likely to eat.

One day we were going to have a big party and I decided to make up a batch of these crackers and see if the crowd liked them. Half way through the event I went up to Leigh and said, "You know people are telling me that--" and he finished my sentence for me: "They LOVE those crackers!!" People had been telling him the same thing too.
After that I wondered how many good recipes I might have discarded because I relied on Leigh's taste buds only. And I started trusting my own judgement more.

 

This year, at the Portland Raw and Living Foods Festival, we were introduced to some wonderful raw bread. The recipe was created by Igor Boutenko (of The Raw Family) and he called it Borodinsky Crackers. (It could be either a bread or cracker, depending on how long it was dehydrated.) Now Igor, as he is from Russia, likes a strong flavored and robust bread. I think his Borodinsky reminds him of the hearty Russian sourdough breads he was accustomed to. We wanted to make the bread at home too, so Igor gave us the recipe.

Back in my New York kitchen experimenting with the ingredients, I started thinking what if I make this bread less strong tasting?" What if I make a milder version and not let it ferment so long?

The first thing I changed was the flaxseeds. Instead of using brown flaxseeds, I switched to golden flaxseeds, which have a milder flavor. Next, I decided not to allow the bread dough ferment so long. Instead of letting it ferment overnight or even longer, as Igor sometimes did, I let it sit for only four hours, just enough time for the dough to rise a little bit. Then I thought: let's sprinkle some sesame seed and dehydrated garlic flakes on the top of the bread before dehydrating it.

That was the extent of my changes to Igor's fabulous recipe, and now I had a bread more to my own liking.
But I continued. I thought: "By adding some other grains to it, this recipe can be used as a base to create a lot of different breads. " Thus the evolution of a recipe continues. (See recipe for Whole Wheatless Sandwich Bread below.)

Let me give you another example. My friend Patrick, an excellent budding raw food chef, sent me one of his soup recipes. I prepared the soup but it was too watery for me. The flavor was good, but I wanted to improve the texture. I made a creamy base by shuffling some of the ingredients around. And now I've got my own version of Patrick's fine soup. (See Thai Soup recipe below.)

So what I am trying to say is, be creative in the kitchen. Shuffle things around. Take out what you don't like, put in what you do like and, lo and behold, you will have made your own version of someone else's recipe -- and it will suit you just fine.

 

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