- The raw food trend is, well, it's hot.

But before you dis it or decide to give away your stove, let me suss out the facts from the hype for you.

There are pros and cons to both raw and cooked food, so today I'm going to show you how they measure up against each other with an inspiring raw versus cooked menu.

Go-To Gazpacho.

Three Ingredient Tomato Sauce.

Wok-Charred Lettuce and Spinach Noodle Stir-Fry with Shrimp.

Zucchini Carpaccio Salad.

That's all coming up now on Ellie's Real Good Food.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for this series has been provided by... (upbeat music) And by... (calm music) - [Narrator] Grapes from California, grown by families for families.

- [Announcer] And by Regal Springs Tilapia.

Ellie's kitchen is provided by Clarke, New England's Sub-Zero & Wolf Showroom and Test Kitchen.

- Hi, I'm Ellie Krieger.

Thanks for joining me on Ellie's Real Good Food.

Raw food is a super hot trend and it's about so much more than cold carrots.

Chefs these days are doing amazing, innovative things with raw food.

And while there's sure plenty of hype around it, there are some real health benefits too.

But cooked food also offers unique benefits that can't be ignored.

I'm gonna pin down the pros and cons of each for you with my first two recipes, which both revolve around tomatoes.

They're easy dishes you'll wanna make over and over again.

And the first one involves raw tomatoes and it is my Go-To Gazpacho.

And literally, that's the name of the recipe because it's completely a go-to for me.

And I'm gonna start off here by, I've cut up these tomatoes already, just kind of quartered them.

And basically you just blend everything up, that's how easy it is.

But I like to keep some parts chunky.

You can have a smooth gazpacho or you could have a chunky gazpacho, and my husband likes the chunky so I like to make him happy, you know what I'm saying?

So first I'm just going to seed this cucumber here.

And I'm gonna put half in the blender and keep half chunky.

Just using spoon to seed that.

So in case you don't know, gazpacho is basically like a chilled tomato soup.

It's easy to make and you can really keep it in the refrigerator for four or five days, but mine never lasts that long.

(laughs) I pretty much eat it up in hours.

So I'm just gonna dice some of this to add into the soup later.

And the thing about using raw tomatoes here, raw tomatoes have a lot of vitamin C, they have a lot of vitamin A.

And one of the things that happens when you cook a tomato is that a lot of the vitamin C gets cooked out.

So one of the advantages of including raw tomatoes in your life is that you get all that vitamin C. I got cucumber half in there, put in the tomatoes.

And the thing about raw food also, if you're eating food raw, then you're not eating processed food, highly processed food.

So if you're eating raw, you're not eating fried chips and things like that.

And I do think that's one of the reasons why a lot of people feel better when they're eating raw.

It's not even necessarily so much because the food itself is raw but because they wind up automatically avoiding things that are kind of not that good for them.

And you just wind up eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, which is great for anyone.

Okay, so that's for later, to add in.

So one of the things you put in a gazpacho to make it thick is some bread.

Now a real traditional raw food person wouldn't accept bread in their gazpacho, so this isn't for that.

But really what it does is it makes it a little bit thick.

And traditionally, you'd use some white bread, but really whole grain works great and I'm always game for adding the fiber and nutrients from whole grain whenever possible.

Put in some water.

Three tablespoons extra virgin olive oil.

And this oil actually helps you absorb the nutrients in the vegetables.

A tablespoon of sherry vinegar.

3/4 of a teaspoon of salt.

And a little garlic, just one small clove of garlic.

That's it, you just blend it up.

Literally takes five minutes to make.

So you could strain it if you wanted to do really clear and smooth, but I kind of like to keep all that great fiber in there and I like the texture of it like this and the thickness.

Yum.

This really needs to sit in the refrigerator for a while to meld together and chill thoroughly.

So I'm gonna stir this in and then pop it in the fridge.

So there you have all the benefits of raw tomatoes, raw peppers, raw cucumber.

Ready to be chilled.

I don't know what everyone else is having, but here's my bowl of gazpacho!

Just kidding.

I'm gonna make a little bowl for myself.

It's been chilling for two hours.

I'm excited to have some.

Just serve some up here, but I love to garnish it with a nice drizzle of olive oil.

Just brings that kind of lusciousness front and center.

Remember, it has those nice chunky bites in it too.

And some celery leaves.

You can put a little basil if you want, you can do a little garnish of parsley, but celery leaves are fun too and a great way to not waste.

A little drizzle of olive oil and it just makes it look so luscious.

Beautiful.

My Go-To Gazpacho.

It just shows you how lovely and luxurious raw food can be.

One of my favorite ways to enjoy tomatoes all year long is to cook them in this delicious three ingredient tomato sauce.

Now my three ingredients are onion, tomatoes, and butter.

And I get in my three ingredient recipes oil, salt, and pepper free, so that's all it takes to make this incredible sauce.

And I'm gonna start here by just halving this onion.

Gonna cook in the sauce.

Just gonna halve it, peel it and halve it, and it's gonna cook in the sauce and then I take it out.

So this sauce you might recognize on some level because it is kind of a mash up between a famous recipe by the late great chef Marcella Hazan, who I actually had the great fortune of meeting, and my friend Maria, her nana's sauce.

So Marcella's sauce is essentially the same ingredients but she uses five tablespoons of butter and no olive oil.

And my friend Maria, her grandma just made it with olive oil so I use a little bit of both.

Okay, so the onion goes in.

One 28 ounce can of whole peeled tomatoes.

And one thing about cooking tomatoes is that it does give you the opportunity to enjoy them year round.

And it actually concentrates the lycopene that's in the tomatoes.

So lycopene is a really potent antioxidant and tomatoes is one of the best sources of it.

And raw tomatoes have some but when you cook it, it actually makes the lycopene more available to your body, absorb it better, and it kind of concentrates it.

So I'm doing three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil.

One tablespoon of butter.

It just adds this layer of richness that's incredible.

And I think of Marcella Hazan every time I put it in.

You can do a little salt and pepper to taste but I'll do that after.

So basically you just cook it like this.

You bring this to a boil and kind of break up the tomatoes as it cooks.

Cook it uncovered, 45 minutes, and wait till you see how cooking transforms this into a fabulous sauce.

This has come together so beautifully.

And you can kind of keep it as chunky or make it as smooth as you want.

Gonna get somewhere in between.

So now you just pull out the onion because all of the onion flavor is essentially extracted at this point.

And it is done.

I just like to taste it for seasoning, see if I need a little more salt or pepper.

So good.

Teeny bit more salt.

'Cause there's salt in the tomatoes already.

Haven't added any yet.

And pepper.

And that is good to go.

Perfect.

And that is really all you need.

So cooking has concentrated the lycopene as I mentioned but it also really concentrated the flavor.

So delicious.

And so was the raw gazpacho.

So raw tomatoes, cooked tomatoes, I want 'em both.

So one of the things I love to do is play around with the notion of raw and cooked.

And I like to cook things you might normally eat raw and eat things raw that I would normally have cooked.

So one thing I love to do is cook lettuce.

So here I'm cooking up some romaine lettuce in a skillet right here.

And you can do this in a wok too, but essentially it's charred lettuce and spinach noodle stir fry with shrimp.

It's a great, quick, easy week night meal.

And just like with any other stir fry, it's really best to have all your ingredients kind of all ready and set to go because once you start cooking, really moves fast.

So I'm just cutting up this lettuce here.

And I do really love to cook firm lettuces like this, so this is romaine.

And I love to put it on the grill.

You can just slice it lengthwise and brush it with a little oil and grill it up, that's one thing I love to do with it.

And what happens is it just gets a little bit charred and softens a bit, but because it's a firm lettuce, it maintains its shape nicely and still has a nice crispness to it.

So I'm using lettuce as well as spinach.

So I'm gonna get the sauce ready and then it's gonna be all set to go because I have everything chopped and ready.

So the sauce that will go into the stir fry starts with a little bit of fish stock, low sodium fish stock, and you can buy that at your fishmonger, a lot of times they sell it.

You can buy it in a box nowadays pretty easily.

Or if you want to, you could use vegetable stock here.

And then two tablespoons of low sodium soy sauce.

Four teaspoons corn starch is just gonna thicken everything up.

So basically I'm making like a slurry kind of sauce.

Add a nice scoop of sriracha, teaspoon of sriracha.

You can put a little more if you want to spice it, but you can always add more later, to the finished dish.

So I'm just gonna whisk this up until corn starch is dissolved.

And that's that.

So all the elements are ready and I'm just gonna get cooking.

So start off by heating my pan, medium high heat.

A tablespoon of canola oil, really neutral flavored oil.

Any neutral flavored oil that takes heat well like that will work for this.

And you can do this in a wok, you can do this in a skillet.

A really big skillet like this you'll need because you need a lot of room to move things around.

Just letting that heat.

And I have my shrimp here.

Just gonna season that up.

Gorgeous shrimp, all cleaned.

I always ask my fishmonger to clean the shrimp for me, or you can buy it frozen like that with the tails on.

If you want to leave the tails on for this, you could.

Just season that with some salt and pepper.

Get that in.

Alright.

So just two to three minutes in there.

Shrimp cooks really fast.

I'm gonna cook the shrimp first and then take it out of the pan and then cook the other ingredients.

And this way I don't risk the shrimp getting overcooked at all.

I'm gonna keep them a little bit undercooked because I'm gonna put them back in with the sauce and they'll cook a little more in there, so I'll just take them out at this stage.

They have a nice little bit of brown on them, which is good.

Now I'm gonna put in some shallots.

Chopped shallot.

And if you wanted to, you could use onion here.

I love the taste of shallot.

I think it's like an underrated ingredient.

Okay, add a little garlic and just get some heat through that.

Literally just about one minute because you want to make sure you don't burn the garlic.

Okay, then lettuce goes in.

Gonna get that nicely charred.

And you want it to pick up some of the brown in the pan.

Also putting in some baby spinach leaves and this will all reduce a little bit.

But I still want it to be kind of bright, kind of perky.

It's always fun to add that element of surprise so people are a little bit like "What is this in my stir fry?"

Okay.

Now I'm gonna put in the noodles.

So I have some fettuccine, some spinach fettuccine that I've cooked up already, just eight ounces.

Just boiled it just like you normally do.

You stir that in, along with the sauce.

And then return the shrimp to the pan.

Just stirring gently until the sauce is reduced a bit.

Just a few minutes.

Thickens up nicely.

So you could totally get the pasta cooked ahead of time and get everything cut up so when you come home from a busy day, you can pull this together so quickly.

Definitely not a ho-hum average week night dinner.

Dinner is ready.

Yum!

That sauce looks great.

So fragrant.

And it's light but also satisfying at the same time, has an element of surprise.

Doesn't that look good?

See those nice pieces of lettuce?

Still quite firm but have nice charred edges.

And that's why it's charred lettuce and spinach noodle stir fry with shrimp.

Raw food might sound kind of limiting but the possibilities are really endless.

Chefs are working wonders with it and it sure can be both delicious and beautiful.

But taking it beyond the basics requires additional creativity and technical expertise.

Even experienced chefs go back to school to learn special raw food techniques to extend their culinary vocabulary.

And in some cooking schools, instruction in preparing raw foods is even a required part of the basic curriculum.

- Cut your zucchini as big as you want the planks.

(mumbles) These I would salt a little bit, so you salt them for maybe like three minutes and they release some moisture so they become a little bit pliable.

- [Ellie] At the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York City, students learn techniques such as sprouting, dehydrating, fermenting, curing, and pickling, which help make nutrients more available, enhance texture and flavor, and enable foods to be preserved.

- Salt breaks down the cell walls.

You can see how it's gonna get watery almost instantly.

- Since we all eat first with our eyes, students are also trained to ensure that dishes made with raw foods can compete with their cooked siblings in how beautifully they're presented on the plate.

So in the name of playing with the whole raw versus cooked concept, I'm making this incredible zucchini noodle salad using raw zucchini.

And I'm spiralizing it with this lovely spiralizer into noodles.

So you want all together about seven cups of zucchini.

Now these days you can buy these noodles kind of already done, so you can do that if you want.

But ever since I got this thing, I cannot resist having so much fun with it.

And sometimes I cook them and sometimes I eat them raw.

But once I get them into the shape of a noodle, I like to cut them a little bit because it makes it a little easier to eat the salad that way.

And then I just put it into the colander.

Alright.

So now the key to this, I think, is really getting that soft texture even though you're not cooking them.

And you do that by getting some of the water out of the vegetable.

And so 1/4 teaspoon of salt.

And just kind of working that through a bit.

And then you let it drain, let everything kind of soften and almost wilt a little bit and let some of the water come out.

Just sort of concentrates the flavor of the zucchini.

And you wind up in the end with more like four cups of noodles, or zoodles, should I say.

Just 30 minutes right like that.

So after just 30 minutes, you see a lot of water has come out.

They have this nice, soft texture, still have a nice crispness as well.

And what I'm going to do is just dry this a little more with some paper towel because you don't want a soggy salad.

Doesn't have to be totally dry but just getting out really any excess water.

Great.

I'm just gonna put this into a bowl and toss it.

Put some olive oil and lemon juice.

Just a tablespoon and 1/2 of extra virgin olive oil.

And about 1 1/2 tablespoons of lemon, roughly half a lemon.

So the cool thing about this is you can completely make this ahead up to this point.

So it will stay in the refrigerator like this, I would say, about four days.

And when I'm ready to serve it, I like to toss in some basil leaves.

I'm gonna cut up some now, just into ribbons.

So about a 1/4 cup altogether.

Stack 'em and roll 'em.

And then just slice them like so.

So just get that in there.

And that's the base.

So the funny thing is when I was first imagining this salad, I was imagining it would be good.

When I first really tried it, I couldn't believe, oh my gosh, how good it is.

I think you're gonna have the same reaction, so I hope you try it.

So here's how I serve it.

It's a really nice starter or a side with a soup.

Let's put some on a plate.

And then I like to shave some Parmesan cheese with a peeler right on top.

And just a few toasted pine nuts.

You can do some toasted almonds if you want but I think the pine nuts provide a really nice kind of, little bit of sweetness, a nutty sweetness as well.

And then finishing touch of fresh cracked pepper.

So beautiful and so absolutely delicious.

And it just goes to show you that raw or cooked, it is easy to hit the sweet spot for a delicious and healthy meal.

It's really good.

(mumbles) flat bread.

Flat bread!

(laughs) When I was a kid, I had an old cow named Elsie.

And it was really weird 'cause I lived in Queens.

And all my neighbors were like "Why are you bringing Elsie "on a bus?"

(laughs) Okay.

(laughs) I don't want this one.

- [Announcer] For these recipes and much more, go to ElliesRealGoodFood.com.

Also connect with Ellie on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Funding for this series has been provided by... (upbeat music) And by... (calm music) - [Narrator] Grapes from California, grown by families for families.

- [Announcer] And by Regal Springs Tilapia.

Ellie's kitchen is provided by Clarke, New England's Sub-Zero & Wolf Showroom and Test Kitchen.