soaked almond and sudachi juice raw dessert

One thing that I can say for sure about living where I do for two years is that I've become pretty domesticated. On a normal day, biking and cooking seem to take up the majority of my time when I'm not at work. Yesterday, Caitlin and I spent the day doing both of these things as we ended up making a desert using only uncooked ingredients. My camera was sitting around so I decided to show how we created it.

The first step we took was to soak about three cups of almonds in water overnight. My mom had included these in a recent package and I wanted to make some kind of raw meal with them but had not really thought about what I wanted that to be exactly. I had a lot of raw honey and coconut oil so I figured that a dessert would probably work out best. After coming across this website we decided to go for a Key Lime Pie taste, replacing the limes with sudachi- a locally grown fruit that looks like a small lime and has a similar flavor.

After soaking the almonds overnight in filtered water (soaking like this is a common way to soften nuts before blending or whipping them in a food processor), we took off the skins in order to have a smooth yogurt-like consistency after they have been whipped. This is what the almonds looked like after a night of soaking and with no skins:



I ended up whipping the almonds in two batches for about five minutes per group. I never really measure ingredients when cooking so I just added water to the mix as the food processor was running in order to get the consistency right. It looked like this when I was done:



Next, I poured the contents onto a strainer in order to separate the almond milk from the whipped mass. I don't think this step is very crucial but it's nice to have some almond milk to use for my coffee or something like that.



Now that we had the base for our dessert, we went to the store and bought some fruits to mix with the whipped almonds to give it the taste that we wanted. Caitlin squeezed about 30 sudachis and exctacted about a cup of juice that would serve as the main flavor of the pie filling.



To make the crust, I blended a bag (250 grams) of prunes with some more (uncooked) almonds, cashews, a half of a banana, and the juice from one lemon. Any time I had ever made a crust with prunes or dates it has been really good and this time was no exception. After finding a container to use, I pressed the mixture into a crust.



Next, we blended one avocado, one mango, a half of a banana, the sudachi juice, some uncooked coconut oil, and several large spoonfuls of raw honey together in the food processor. The mixture was then combined with the whipped almonds to create the raw pie filling.



The final step was to simply pour the filling into the crust and enjoy the sight of a totally uncooked, all-natural desert.

I put it in the freezer (which some people would say takes away the pure 'raw' title) in order to harden the filling and just had my first taste of it this morning. I didn't feel bad eating this desert for breakfast because it's mainly just fruits and nuts...but I'm sure I'll be eating this at the end of every meal this week because it turned out so good.



So, that was one of a few things that we made yesterday. If you have any questions about the recipe you can email me (brad.direnzi@gmail.com) or, better yet, buy a raw food cookbook if you really want to get into it.