HOW HAVE THE TECHNIQUES CHANGED SINCE YOU STARTED?
CAN YOU THINK OF ONE DISH THAT EXEMPLIFIES THE NEW TECHNIQUES AND
When I first got into raw food, everybody had a blender and a dehydrator. Over
EQUIPMENT?
the last six years, we’ve started to incorporate more types of fermentation; we
Sure, we have this very simple dish on our lunch menu—or it appears to
use something called an ultrasonic homogenizer, it’s a multiplication. And we
be simple. It’s a salad, but it’s got a coconut bacon that’s smoked with
do a lot of smoking, and we use thermal immersion. So we’re incorporating
our smoking gun, and it’s got this Portobello mushroom that’s prepared
all these modernist techniques that allow for different textures and lighter
under vacuum-sealed pressure in a machine called the thermal immersion
ways to prepare the food with less fat and less nuts. It’s changed from one-
circulator, and that allows us to keep all the moisture inside the mushroom
dimensional, completely raw or dehydrated recipes to utilizing the modernist
while still tenderizing it, or “cooking” it, at a low temperature whereas if
equipment and all the new ingredients that are available in the market. If
you dehydrated it, it would get dry. So that dish combines the smoking, it
people ask how we do what we do, I say the best ingredients, really innovative
combines the thermal immersion, and it’s still a salad.
techniques and equipment, and a lot of creativity.
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