18/10/2008

Pink Sushi


I’m feeling inspired after seeing Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s beetroot ice-cream and beetroot brownies the other night on Channel 4. Some experimenting ‘raw style’ this w/end is called for, but in the meantime, I can highly recommend the following.

This recipe is probably up there as one of my top ten autumnal raw dishes. It’s unattributed on the Waitrose website, but I think it’s one of Katia’s recipes. Her very beautiful website seems to be offline at the moment, but she was famous at Triyoga (alas, she no longer runs the café there) for her beetroot pâté and I do remember a little feature in the Waitrose magazine Food Illustrated about the café ... True, it’s very good with oodles of spouts wrapped in nori, but at the moment, I’m still wading through a glut of home-grown cucumbers so I tend to make cucumber sandwiches, with hefty cucumber ‘sandwich’ slices filled with the pâté. Yum!

An extra word on ingredients: As it’s a pretty decadent recipe (oil and nuts) I’ve found halving the quantity of nuts works just as well and the pâté still sets beautifully in the fridge overnight. I tried substituting non-raw maple syrup with raw agave (which I’m always suspicious of being truly ‘raw’ as it has to go through such an intense processing regime): it didn’t work, the tang was missing. Continuing on the tang front I used Bragg’s raw apple cider vinegar – excellent tang!

Blending tip: Unlike the recipe guidelines I’ve had the smoothest results by blending in three stages. First, the liquids: oil, maple, vinegar; then the pepper, beetroot, ginger and chilli; and finally the nuts. I should also say that for the best results it’s best to set the Vita-mix to ‘high’ speed (something I rarely do in my day-to-day life).

3 comments:

Michelle said...

thankyou!! i'm inspired and can't wait to try the nori wraps...beetroot pink is in, methinks! xxx

Neeta said...

thanks fleur, i tried with half the nuts,
ate it with almond and sesame crackers instead of the nori wraps, it worked very well, delicious :-)
so love the pink too.....
love xxx
neeta

Solar Oven said...

Hello lovelies, there is undoubtedly something to this beetroot pink - it seems to bewitch everyone! Love Fxx