An innovator who graduated from the California Culinary Academy, Klein is certainly no neophyte to world-class cuisine. She picks some of the fresh herbs in her own three-acre organic-vegetable garden in Marin County, and nothing in her kitchen is heated above 118 degrees Fahrenheit (the point at which, some believe, enzymes in food begin to degenerate and cause harm to the body). She’s writing a book on gourmet living foods that’s due out this summer. NEWSWEEK’s Nadine Joseph spoke with Klein recently about her unique philosophy and the case for trading in your grill for a good veggie slicer. Excerpts:
Klein: I was in Thailand working on a book about curries, when I ran into a friend, [the actor] Woody Harrelson, who was eating only living foods. He persuaded me to try a diet of raw and living foods. As a chef, I thought to myself, “I’m not sure about this.” But I tried it and liked it. It brought back memories of my grandparents, who were organic farmers and would ask me, as I surveyed the garden, “What do you smell?” If I said peaches, well, that was what was ripe and what we would taste. I grew up eating from the garden. You’re focused on the lusciousness of what’s in season. I got excited about creating a new cuisine based on raw foods. My creativity found its niche. The chef in me went to work figuring out what makes something crisp and what makes it moist, trying to turn these flavors into a sensual dining experience.
Some raw foods, like nuts, have to be soaked overnight so that the enzyme inhibitors are released. Every nut I use is soaked. Miso, for instance, is a living food, not a raw food.
Think of how you feel after a [holiday] feast. Digesting a cooked meal drains energy. This doesn’t happen with living foods, and the extra energy allows our bodies to focus on cleansing and rebuilding. We need less sleep. But the restaurant is not about health food or faux food–it has to be yummy.
I balance different flavors and different textures. I try to take raw food to a different level. It’s like a piece of music: it has to have all the chords. In a carrot, you may get sweetness and crunch and aroma, but that’s only one part of the culinary journey. It’s a sensual experience. When the plate is put down, it is visually exciting and has different aromas and oils and textures. It’s more complex than just a carrot. I’ve taken the carrot beyond that into a full dining experience. I’ve layered it with other flavors and textures, so that it stands out as an incredible representation of a carrot in a complex, multidimensional dish.
It starts out with small things. Some people don’t smell their produce before they buy it. Is it ripe? Some cities and rural areas have farmers markets. You can start there. People go to the store with a recipe, and come hell or high water, they’re going to cook that dish, even if the vegetables aren’t fresh or ripe or in season.
Ninety percent of my clientele are not health-food eaters or vegetarians. A lot of people say, “I could never be a vegan or a vegetarian, but I could eat this way every night for the rest of my life.”
What’s lacking is the intensity of fire. It’s a cool kitchen, where the exhaust fans are not running and the loudest noise is the blender. There is a sense of cleanliness and purity and calmness. Knife skills are important. Most of our gadgets are juicers, dehydrators and slicing instruments.
When you start eating this way, the body doesn’t have the same craving for hot food. I used to need a hot beverage in the morning. Now I need my morning coconut water.
