Japanese Ramen: The soup of all soups, fit for an Emperor
Let us put raw foods versus cooked foods on the scale.
Which one is better for us? Or is there perhaps a compromise?
Cooking is my passion and I am at it at work as well as at home whenever I can… plus I cook at friends` and relations` kitchens too…
Having established this, I would like to go against and somewhat challenge the concept of cooking by heat, just to spice up the conversation a bit.
I love anything spicy after all…not just my food!
Let`s start with defining what cooking in the usual sense is:
Cooking is basically using heat to tenderize raw food ingredients till soft and good to eat. Heat can be naked flames like a camp fire or barbeque, can be gas flame, electric heat rings and oven, microwave oven, halogen oven etc.
You will have at least one but probably more of these in your kitchen.
However much I love cooking, I must admit there is a lot going for not cooking but eating raw or semi raw foods too.
I am a plant based chef, so I will not dwell on the cooking/not cooking of meats, fish shellfish etc as that is not my area of expertise.
Rather I want to dive here into the topic of just half cooked vegetables.
The reason being ; the more raw or half cooked vegetables we consume, the better for us. Just read up about raw plant based diets and you will be amazed how much more nutrition remains in raw or half cooked vegetables and fruits compared to them being fully cooked.
Some vitamins like vitamin B and C get completely killed by heat, lots of fibre dissipates from heat just to mention 2 here. This is bad news indeed!
Unfortunately it goes against all I know and all I love! As such I don`t really want to hear it, but nor can I ignore it! It sucks…to say the least!
Still, I could not be a raw foodie regardless of how much healthier it is.
I love my cooked food and I will always cook for the rest of my life.
I respect the raw plant based food concept, I take my hat off to it being superior, but for me… thank you but no thank you!
The joy of cooking and eating cooked food is something I can never give up. Period!
The raw truth is however, that the list of health benefits raw or nearly raw foods offer is as long as a journey to the Moon and back.
Let me just mention 5 of the most important ones: weight loss, less risk of heart attacks, less risk of type 2 Diabetics, less risk of high blood pressure, less risk of high blood cholesterol
We now have arrived to the 64 million $ question :
Is there perhaps a happy MEDIUM ( excuse the pun), whereby one can have cooked hot food but have it nutrition rich, vitamin rich and fibre rich at least similar to as if it was raw food in health terms?
With other words, can we have our cake and eat it?
Well, I have good news for you, as we CAN!
It`s called LUKEWARM foods!
Lukewarm foods taste out of this world and posh restaurants everywhere are serving up lukewarm dishes these days. Lukewarm is in vogue…
Basically anything you can eat raw, such as capsicums, carrots, tomatoes, onions, garlic, mushrooms, courgettes, cucumbers, radishes, bean sprouts, spinach, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, peas, mange tout etc, as well as of course all fruits can be consumed lukewarm too. At less than 42 degree Celsius, (115 degree F) they will retain all their goodness as if they were completely raw.
Half cooked is the happy compromise between fully cooked and fully raw!
Did I hear a huge sigh of relief?
One brilliant example is my most favourite soup the Japanese Ramen.
I am sure most of us know it, but for those who do not, may I introduce it:
Ramen is a stock type soup, ( not thickened) basically a plant based see- through consome.
It is full of umami from shiitake mushrooms, miso, soya sauce as well as the other vegetables mentioned above.
If you are using dried shiitake mushrooms, they should be re hydrated in cold water for a few hours, or in hot water for about 30 minutes before cooking them. If they are whole mushrooms, once they have soaked and pulped up, slice them into slices before adding them to your base stock. They need about 30 minutes of simmering to become tender.
When the mushrooms are tender, I cook in the stock some egg free Ramen or rice noodles. This is the end of my cooking part. It is not difficult…
Now comes the raw part:
I usually do this while my stock with the mushrooms is simmering.
I cut up my carrots into as thin match sticks as possible( these actually may be slightly cooked in the stock if preferred).
Then I build my Ramen bowl:
Into the bowl I add some raw and finely chopped: pak choi, spring onions, chopped coriander(cilantro), fresh chillies, crushed peanuts, sea weed, sesame seeds and oil, soya sauce and tahini.
I also like to add some slivers of cooked tofu to my Ramen as tofu contains lots of healthy plant based protein, essential to a balanced diet. I cram all these into my Ramen bowl up to about half full, and place the cooked noodles on top, making my bowl 3/4 full at this stage.
Lastly, I ladle the boiling hot shiitake mushroom stock onto the veg + noodles + tofu, till completely covered and the bowl it completely full.
To finish it off, I squeeze some fresh lime juice on top of it.
This soup will tick a lot of boxes, it will be healthy, nutritious, tasty, very morish, extremely comforting, hydrating, non fattening, and will not cost the earth to make it…both literally as well as metaphorically speaking!
It is a Friendly Soup: friendly to your health, friendly to animals, friendly to the planet, friendly to your bank balance and last but not the least to your taste buds too! What`s not to like?
Enjoy!
