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dehydrated spread

Dehydrated raw foods satisfy you. They give your body-mind the nutrients you’re crying for.

The recipes on this page use a blender or food processor. For simple quick snacks — vegetable chips, dried fruits, unroasted nuts — see recipes in What Foods to Dehydrate.

When you get what you need, cravings go. Addictions go. They fall away like leaves from a tree in Autumn.

You don’t need will-power. YOU NEED TO EAT RIGHT. Dehydrated food is tasty fun food that will fill you, satisfy you, heal you. Dehydrated living and raw foods are perfectly balanced by Nature. They BALANCE you.

A dehydrator makes warm raw meals without killing a single enzyme. Cooking destroys all enzymes. Dr. Howell in his book Enzyme Nutrition (#ad) proved that the more enzymes you eat, the longer and more vibrantly you live.

The Vitamix Blender works better than a food processor for blending the batter. I was using a Cuisinart food processor but as soon as I could afford it, I bought a Vitamix.

If like me you have L’Equip, then cut sheets of non-stick baking paper to fit the solid sheets, and spread batter onto this. It makes it easy to flip the blend onto mesh screens after a while for faster drying. Today I use teflex sheets, cut down to fit each L’Equip tray. Benefit of teflex is that it’s washable and re-usable.

L’Equip and Cuisinart

All my cracker recipes are for one full 7-cup Cuisinart Classic food processor and a L’Equip Dehydrator with six solid sheets. So the batter fills the Cuisinart bowl, then fills the six L’Equip sheets. They make two full one-quart (1-liter) jars of crackers, each cracker about 3″ x 3″ in size (7x7cm).

Sproutman’s Kitchen Garden Cookbook (#ad) points out that “the small model Cuisinart excels [for grinding sprouted wheat] because it has a high blade-to-bowl impact ratio.” He advises that when buying a food processor, you look at the models with small bowls and high RPM’s — “this creates tremendous force that finely decimates the grains.”

Of course, the bowl should not be too small! It must fit at least seven cups of ingredients with room to spare.

Quick Crunch + Pie Crust

Buy whole organic wheat berries at a health food store. The soft golden spring wheat is best. The hard brown winter wheat is for growing into grass for wheatgrass juice.

Sprinkle wheat seeds into your GoGreen Sprouter trays. Leave for 2-3 days until the short thick shoot is slightly green (the one growing into grass).

Sprouter automatically sprays seeds with high-oxygen mist every three hours, so you get no mold. Then sprinkle your wheat sprouts onto Dehydrator mesh trays and dry at 100°F (38°C) for 24 hours.

Store in a glass jar, with a cotton ball to absorb moisture.

Grind the dried sprouts in a coffee grinder as you need them — sprinkle on your and your pet’s food for a delicious nutrient-rich supplement. AND:

  • Mix your ground sprouts with apple juice for an instant raw pie crust, then fill pie with blended fruit.

Or sprout raw buckwheat — my favorite crunchies. See how to morph them into a taste sensation here in Easy Quick Recipes. They freed me of my addiction to corn chips!

Give your family the food you need to be FREE of dentists and doctors! Raw Living foods.

Animal Companions

The Quick Crunch recipe above is an easy way to give carbohydrate to your animal companions. For humans, fresh fruit is the best source of carbohydrates, but for animals dried wheat sprouts are easiest (ground to a powder). Sprinkle it on their food — and of course on yours!

I keep a small dark-glass bottle of ready-ground, dried wheat sprouts in my refrigerator to sprinkle on the meals of my cat Tommy and dog Gracie, and a large jar of dehydrated whole wheat sprouts (ready for grinding) in the cupboard.

Cats

For cats, sprouted grains are the closest thing to the pre-digested grains they’d eat from the stomach of a bird or mouse.

Here’s Tigger + Teddy at 2 months, born into feral litters and adopted by me. Sadly both were killed by cars. My road is too quiet, they don’t anticipate a car. My fence keeps my dogs in, but not my cats.

Give your animal children the Secrets of Health you give to yourself — baby greens from your Sprouter fresh daily (blended or finely chopped), Energy Soup often (see Recipe here) and exercise in oxygen!

Superoxide Dismutase – SOD

Leave the wheat sprouts in your Sprouter until they’re 2 inches high (5cm) growing into grass, then dehydrate and grind. Now you have a powerful SOD supplement to sprinkle on food. The greener the plant, the more SOD.

SOD is a protein, and our fifth most abundant enzyme, it’s in every cell. Together with catalase (finely balanced with SOD in fresh young grass) it turns harmful free radicals into stable oxygen and water. It’s your reverse-aging enzyme. Wherever you’re at risk for free radical damage — wrinkles, arthritis — you need SOD.

Ed McCabe in his book Oxygen Therapies (#ad) describes high-dosage SOD tablets made from wheat sprouts: “Each tablet is equal to a square foot of wheat sprouts, 2 inches high, or 8 bottles of regular SOD found in stores.”

Why buy DEAD tablets, when it’s so cheap to grow LIVING sprouts? The world’s most-productive one-minute job is to sprinkle seeds in an Automatic Sprouter. Your Sprouter does the work, and you reap the food when it’s ripe for your needs — sprouts for drying, grass for juicing, baby greens for salads.

Hydroponic wheat sprouts are rich in sugars, the good kind your cells need for energy, and in vitamins, minerals, proteins (pre-digested into amino acids) and Nature’s magical nutrients unknown to science.

Hydroponic means it’s grown without soil, quickly, easily, in a Sprouter in your kitchen or basement.

What About Gluten?

In the early 2000’s, a big hoo-haa arose that wheat has the bad gluten (as does rye and barley) that scratches your intestinal wall. Slowly over time you get “leaky gut.” Your intestinal wall gets holes in it (becomes permeable).

Bigger undigested macro-molecules pass through these holes into your bloodstream. There your immune system will attack them as enemies.

A weakened immune system busy with a bunch of “ghost enemies” has fewer troops to catch the real enemy like a cold or flu bug.

If you’re worried about gluten, then stick to crackers made with flax seeds or sprouted beans — such as my pizza cracker below that uses sprouted chick peas.

In South Africa where I live, EarthShine makes a delicious Mediterranean cracker with soaked golden flax seeds, dried tomatoes, dried olives, mixed herbs & a touch of Kalahari salt (in US you’d use Himalayan crystal salt).

Good Dehydrating Recipe Books

I highly recommend:

for tasty raw crackers and other snack foods, and raw warm-meals. Easily my favorite rawfood recipe books for dehydrating.

Sprouting the Wheat for Crackers

Until you have an Automatic Sprouter, you can sprout the wheat berries in jars. But jars don’t work for the grass SOD recipe above.

Here’s a how-to video on youtube — Make an Easy Jar Sprouter & Start Sprouting Sprouts!

Buy wide-mouthed one-liter preserving jars and nylon mesh (from hardware store) or mosquito netting. Push out the center disk in the jar lid, cut out a circle of mesh big enough to drape over the mouth of the jar and hang half-inch down its sides. Screw the outer rim of the lid over the mesh to hold it in place, this lets air in, keeps bugs out.

Buy golden spring wheat berries. Use one cup wheat berries per one quart jar (one-liter). Measure off the wheat and remove any stones and broken bits — I sift through them quickly on a white plate. Pour the berries into the jars, cover with an inch of filtered water. Soak for 8 hours or overnight. Pour off water, drain upside-down at 45° angle, rinse and drain twice a day for two days until there’s a tender shoot.

You’ll see white hair-like rootlets and one thick shoot that will grow into the grass blade. This shoot should match the length of the berry, not be shorter because then it’ll be short on nutrition and difficult to grind. And not longer for crackers and bread (not going green).

If you’re not ready to use your wheat sprouts when they’re ready, store them in an airtight container in refrigerator to stop the sprouting process — place the center disk back into the lid to make it airtight.

You grow bean sprouts in the same way, except start with one or two tablespoons of beans. Not all beans will sprout. Lentil, mung, and chickpea are good.

For microgreens, begin with alfalfa, broccoli and clover seeds. Personally I can’t stand the taste of clover!

Grinding the Wheat

For bread, I grind my wheat sprouts in my Samson Juicer with mincing (blank) screen. It grinds each kernel perfectly to make a soft smooth dough.

“Every grain should be fractionated into paste,” writes Sproutman, “unfractionated wheat berries will give the unpleasant taste of little rocks in the finished bread [or cracker].”

It’s *only wheat* sprouts that need a good multi-purpose Juicer for grinding. For other recipes using soft grains like buckwheat sprouts (not a true grain) or soaked nuts or sprouted beans, a good blender or food processor will work fine.

For crackers, I grind the wheat sprouts first in my Samson with mincing screen, then I mix with other ingredients in a food processor. But for bread, I never mix it in the food processor, rather I knead the other ingredients into the ground sprouts. A food processor makes the bread too soggy.

Rinse your wheat sprouts about 3-4 hours before grinding. Sprouts that are too dry or too wet will not grind properly. Also this rinses off any mold (naked to our eye).

For grinding your cracker blends, use a food processor with the stainless steel or S-blade. Or best of all, use the Vitamix Blender. An ordinary blender won’t work because it needs excessive water. Only Vitamix blends without water.

I use my judgment as to how much liquid to add when making each batch of cracker blend. It comes with experience. You want a fairly smooth paste-like consistency that’ll slide onto the solid sheets, not too watery and not too chunky, something you can pat down and even out with a knife.

Carrot Cake Crackers

These are high-carbohydrate when you leave out the fatty nuts. Carbohydrates are good for energy.

I loved to munch on these when I worked in a New York office, after my lunch of baby greens, bean sprouts and vegetable fruits (any of tomato, cucumber, zucchini, squash, red or yellow pepper).

I’ve adapted the Carrot Cake Raisin Bars recipe in Vibrant Living (#ad) by Levin & Cederquist. In their recipe, they make spicy nutty bars by dehydrating until moist and chewy, and store in refrigerator. I dehydrate into a cracker and store in cupboard.

Tsp = Tablespoon, tsp = teaspoon, C = cup.

  • 3 C carrots, finely grated (about 4 medium carrots)
  • 4 C sprouted wheat berries (1C wheat berries will grow into 2C wheat sprouts in 2 days)
  • 1/2 C soaked almonds, finely ground (optional)
  • 1/2 C walnuts, ground (optional)
  • 20 small pitted dates (raw unpitted)
  • 1/3 C raisins
  • 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice – 1/4 t each of ground cloves, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon
  • 1 tsp vanilla essence

Pit dates and soak them with raisins for an hour, pour off soak water, grind in food processor and set aside. Grate carrots in salad maker or food processor with grater attachment, and set aside. Grind wheat sprouts with some of the soak water, then add all ingredients back into food processor — dried fruit, carrots, spices, and nuts if you’re using them (ground first). Add more soak water, and grind to paste consistency. Smoothe batter out on solid sheets, and dehydrate until each sheet is a crisp dry cracker, about 24-36 hours.

With all crackers, I remove them from the solid sheet after 12 hours, flip them upside down and switch to a mesh sheet. With L’Equip if I’m dehydrating something I know will stick, e.g. nachos crackers made with nuts (oil is sticky) I place a sheet of non-stick baking paper in each solid sheet, exactly fitting the base. Then after 12-18 hours, I flip the solid sheet over onto a mesh sheet, and easily peel the paper off. I continue to dry them upside-down on a mesh sheet, same as with Excalibur (which has non-stick solid Teflex sheets).

Crackers store for months in air-tight glass jars in cupboard. Add cotton balls to each jar to absorb any moisture.

Cashew Yogurt Crunch

I combined this recipe from the two recipe books above — Sproutman gave me the yogurt crunch, and Vibrant Living (#ad) the cashew-cream.

This is the recipe that ended my addiction to chocolate. I used to sit down at my computer with 2-3 large bars of Cadbury’s chocolate, I couldn’t begin work without it, until I switched to cashew-cream crunch.

Today I begin with a glass of fresh orange juice or green juice, and a banana with a couple of raw crackers. Lots of sugar for my brain — both simple in the juice and banana, and complex in the sprouted-grain crackers — but a far cry from chocolate!

  • 1 C cashews
  • 1 C pure water (use soak water from dates)
  • 1/3 C dates (raw unpitted)
  • 1/2 tsp vanilla essence

Pit dates and soak for an hour, pour off soak water. Blend cashews and a little soak water, keep adding water until you have consistency of smooth heavy cream. Blend in dates and vanilla. Smoothe batter out on solid sheets, and dehydrate at 92°F (33°C) until it tastes tart and sour, about 6-8 hours. Turn dehydrator up to 115°F (46°C) and continue to dry until crisp, about a day.

The more dates in the cream, the more leathery it will be, less crispy. You can also make this with just cashews and water, one cup of each.

Raw cashew-date cream (without dehydrating) is delicious as a topping on blended fruit, when you want a quick filling meal.

In my growth into raw foods, a turning point was the day I realized Fruit is a complete meal for humans, not a between-meal snack.

Pizza Crackers

This is high-protein and a perfect chips substitute! Protein is good for losing weight because you feel fuller for longer. Read why in Green Smoothies.

Recipe by Julie Rodwell, copied from The Complete Book of Raw Food (#ad) by Lori Baird, editor. I love this book, it has more than 350 recipes from the world’s top rawfood chefs — 44 in all, so you get a wide variety of recipes! If you’ve heard the chef’s name, s/he is in this book.

Big thank you to Rhio of hookedonraw.com for shipping me this book! Join Rhio’s newsletter today, it’s the most inspiring in the rawfood world.

Other raw pizza recipes are so high in fat. They use olive oil which is 100% fat and empty calories. This recipe is high in protein with its sprouted chickpeas (also called garbanzo beans). My body-mind smiles inside when it gets protein.

If you prefer high-carbs to high-protein, then sprouted buckwheat will work well in place of chickpeas — that’s 12 cups after sprouting, or 6-7 for L’Equip.

Ingredients — makes 6-7 Excalibur trays, I halve them for my L’Equip. If you forget to soak flax + sesame seeds, then grind them dry in a coffee grinder. Actually I never soak them because flax is so tough to grind when wet, even in a good Juicer with blank screen.

  • 2 to 3 dried or fresh cayenne or dried Thai devil peppers
  • 1/2 C or more fresh or dried desert sage, rosemary, tarragon, parsley, or other herbs — I use Italian seasoning herbs
  • 4 C chickpeas, soaked overnight and sprouted for 3 to 5 days (they will triple in volume)
  • 2 C flax seed or 1 cup flax seed mixed with 1 cup sesame seeds, soaked for 8 hours but not drained
  • 4 stalks celery, chopped to reduce strings (optional)
  • 4 to 5 large red bell peppers, chopped
  • 1 red onion, chopped
  • 2 pounds tomatoes, chopped (cherry tomatoes are best)
  • 3 to 8 cloves garlic
  • 1/2 to 1 tsp sea salt (not optional to most tastes) — I use Himalayan crystal salt
  • other bland raw green veggies, such as broccoli stalks or zucchini (avoid additional onions, scallions, leeks, and the like, as the blend will be too strong) — I leave these out

Grind the dried hot peppers and the sage or other dried herbs in a coffee grinder until powdered (this isn’t essential but prevents nasty surprise mouthfuls). Run the chickpeas, flax, celery, bell peppers, onion, tomatoes, garlic, and ground hot peppers and herbs through a Juicer like Samson using the mincing screen. Blend everything well.

I find it quickest to grind the sprouted chickpeas in my Vitamix, and pour out into a bowl. Then grind all the other ingredients (the sauce) in Vitamix and last (to reduce oxidation) grind the flax and sesame seeds in a coffee grinder. Then mix them all together with a big wooden spoon in the bowl.

Spread the mixture onto Teflex sheets, making sure it is at least 1/4-inch thick all over. Dehydrate at 105F for 3 to 4 hours. Turn over the crackers, and score them into squares with a knife. Dehydrate another 24 hours or more, to desired crispness. Store the crackers in an airtight container. I store them in a glass jar with an oxygen-absorber sachet, the kind you get in vitamin bottles.

Editor Lori Baird’s note: This is a crunchy cracker that was derived from the Boutenko’s Everybody’s Favorite Cracker recipe. They are very popular and Julie has people begging her to make them commercially.

Hot Nachos Chips

This is a high-fat recipe. I adapted it from Alissa Cohen’s Nacho Cheese in the chapter Raw Cheeses, Dairy & Creamy Sauces in her book Living On Live Foods (#ad).

  • 2 C soft nuts e.g. macadamia or cashew
  • 1.5 C red bell pepper
  • 1 C orange pieces
  • 4 cloves garlic
  • 1 juiced lemon
  • 1/4 tsp seasoning salt e.g. Herbamare
  • 3/4 tsp chilli powder preferably from home-dried+ground hot chilli peppers.

Blend until smooth in food processor, spread 1/8-inch thick on solid sheets, and dry at 105°F (40°C). Use less chilli powder if you don’t like it too hot, but the sulfur heat of chillis is good for you — especially good for ulcers and killing parasites.

Swiss Cheese

Another cool recipe from the same chapter of Alissa Cohen’s Living On Live Foods (#ad). I’ve not tried it (hard to get nutritional yeast in South Africa) but Alissa writes: “This cheese tastes exactly like real Swiss cheese … without the holes!“

  • 1 C cashews
  • 2 Tbsp nutritional yeast
  • 1 Tbsp lemon juice
  • 1/4 C water

Blend all ingredients in a food processor. Spread batter thinly in dehydrator tray, about 1/8-inch thick. Dehydrate at 105°F (40°C). After 5-6 hours, flip cheese over onto a mesh screen and continue dehydrating for 2-4 hours. Total time is 7-10 hours.

For Fresh (not dehydrated) Essential Fatty Acid recipes like nut milk, yogurt and cream, pick them up here: Healthy Fat Recipes like Nut Milk & Seed Cheese, and In-depth Info on Essential Fatty Acids.

Ginger-Oat Cookies

Another good high-carb recipe for energy. I concocted this one after tasting delicious ginger-oat cookies from a factory in Scotland. The dates give them a soft chewy texture, not a crunchy cracker like the pizza.

  • 3 C oat groats
  • 1 C fresh or dried dates
  • 1 small lemon, juiced
  • 1 Tbsp raw honey
  • 2 Tbsp fresh ginger, chopped
  • raw ginger powder, for sprinkling

Grind oat groats to a powder in coffee grinder. Pour into large mason jar, cover with 2-3 inches of water, and soak for an hour or more.

In separate jar, soak the dates for a shorter time, say half-hour. The trick with soaking dried fruit is to get it soft enough to blend, but not lose the sugars to the soak water.

Blend the dates, lemon juice, honey and fresh ginger in Vitamix Blender. Taste, add more ginger if you like. Strain water off oats and drink, it’s rich in bone-building silicon. Pour strained oats into bowl, and mix in your tasty blend.

Pour onto dehydrator trays. For extra ginger zing, I sprinkle the top with ginger powder. To make ginger powder, you slice fresh ginger into strips, dehydrate them, and keep in airtight jar. Then grind a few strips in coffee grinder when you need powder.

I add ginger powder to herb teas. Also love to slice up a fresh apple and sprinkle ginger powder on the slices. Ginger is a blood-cleanser and anti-inflammatory. Where there’s illness, there’s inflammation. So anti-inflammatories are healing. I’m a big ginger lover! Not for strict natural hygienists.

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