Tag Archives: fruit

Picture of a kaki cocoa pudding

Kaki cocoa pudding

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Yoga Kitchen – Simple, healthy, and plant-based

One plus one equals two for once

I have yet to come across a dessert that is easier to make than this chocolate-flavoured pudding. It is 100 % plant-based, consists of just two ingredients and also fits into a completely raw diet.
Kaki fruit or persimmons appear in our shops around the end-of-year festivities. They look like large, bulbous orange tomatoes and also feel completely like tomatoes, both on the inside and outside. You can also find them in organic shops.

What ingredients do you need?

Could it be any simpler?

  • 7 ripe persimmons
  • 7 tablespoons of cocoa powder, unsweetened

For each kaki fruit, use one leveled tablespoon of cocoa.
I personally prefer raw cocoa powder.
Seven persimmons will yield a total volume of one litre of pudding. So depending on how much you want to prepare, you can adjust the number of kakis and spoonfuls of cocoa.
Picture of three kakis and cocoa

This is how to prepare them

  • Peel the kaki fruits
  • Cut them into chunks
  • Place them in the bowl of a food processor with an S-shaped blade and grind them into a syrupy liquid
  • Add the cocoa and blend some more

Then pour the mixture into the mould or moulds of your choice. Wet the mould before filling, that way you can easily release the pudding from the mould after it has set.
Let the pudding set in the fridge for 2-3 hours before serving. It’s almost unbelievable: you don’t need any binding agent to give this pudding its firmness. Magical!
All done!

You can decorate the pudding with a variety of toppings. Here are a few ideas:

  • grated coconut
  • almond paste or peanut butter
  • fresh or thawed berries
  • raw cocoa nibs

Here’s another idea for a sauce based on cashews and chopped hazelnuts.
Additional tip: You can also use this pudding as a filling for a no-bake cake base made with ground nuts and dry fruits. This way you get a very original and light chocolate cake.

The taste test and health verdict

This chocolate pudding is very much to everyone’s liking and is super easy to digest.
You have the enjoyment of chocolate flavour without the drawbacks of classic chocolate preparations that often require additional sugar or sweeteners, and you also don’t get the fats so typical of chocolate.
Tell me: is our society now collectively caught in a trip of chocolate addiction or not? I think so. Chocolate has evolved from a luxury product to something that is considered normal to be available daily. While cocoa undoubtedly contains interesting minerals, chocolate, especially black chocolate, enjoys an exaggerated status in terms of health it doesn’t really deserve at all. Best only to consume it with caution and in limited quantities.

Kaki Cocoa Pudding, per 100 g product

Energy Carboh. Sugars Fat Sat. Fat Protein Fibre Salt
344,6 kJ/82,3 kcal 21,7 g 12,6 g 0,9 g 0,5 g 1,6 g 5,6 g 0,002 g

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Picture of a fvegan ruit crumble

Warm fruit crumble

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Yoga Kitchen – Simple, healthy, and plant-based

Autumn sonata with seasonal fruit, oatmeal and walnuts

A very quick and easy dessert, ideal for autumn or winter.
This is when freshly harvested fruit and nuts are available in abundance.
Warmed fruit delivers a subtle palette of flavours and aromas. The spices not only add a touch of flavour but also aid digestion. The recipe is 100% plant-based with no added refined sugar.

What ingredients do you need?

For the fruit marinade:

  • 4 pieces of seasonal fruit
  • one tablespoon lemon juice
  • a teaspoon of cinnamon (or more, depending on taste)
  • another half tablespoon of maple syrup
  • Optional: half a teaspoon of ground cardamom

For the crumble pastry

  • 120 g walnuts (almonds, walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts or a mixture
  • 100 g rolled oats
  • 2 tablespoons heatable oil (for example sunflower oil or coconut oil (melted))
  • 4 tablespoons maple syrup
  • 2 teaspoons cinnamon
  • Sea salt to taste

Here’s how you can do it:

In a nutshell, it’s very simple:

  • You mix the fruit with the marinade ingredients and spread it out on the bottom of a baking tray.
  • Then you mix the crumble ingredients and place this mixture as a second layer on top of the fuit layer.
  • Then bake in the oven.

Proceed step by step as follows:

  • Preheat the oven to 180°C (or 170°C with hot air circulation)
  • Cut the fruit into pieces
  • Mix the fruit with the marinade: lemon juice, cinnamon, maple syrup and optionally cardamom
  • Spread the fruit mixture in the bottom of a mould or on a baking tray and set aside
  • Coarsely chop the oats and walnuts in a food processor fitted with an S-shaped blade
  • Add the oil, maple syrup, cinnamon and sea salt and blend
  • Add the crumble batter in a second layer over the fruit in the baking tray
  • Bake for approximately 20 minutes in the preheated oven

And there you have it! The crumble can be eaten chilled but is best warm. You can serve it with a generous spoonful of vegan cream if you like.

Is it better to eat fruit raw?

Raw or not raw: it’s one of those debates in the world of food that can often be the subject of a veritable religion :

  • For raw food fans, it’s good to eat lots of fruit and heating above 40°C is taboo.
  • For followers of Ayurveda and macrobiotics, steaming or cooking fruit is preferable. According to these prescriptions, you are better off eating fruit in moderation, and separately from other foods.

Well, the truth will lie, as it often does, somewhere in the middle.
My advice is to find out how you digest fruit best. In any case, heating fruit comes at the expense of some of its nutritional value. This has been scientifically measured. In fact, some vitamins (such as vitamin C, which is naturally abundant in fruit) are degraded when heated.
The shorter the food is heated and the gentler the cooking technique, the greater the remaining nutritional value. Mild cooking techniques are therefore better.

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Picture of cinnamon rolls

Fruity cinnamon rolls

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Yoga Kitchen – Simple, healthy, and plant-based

Sophisticated natural sweet

Cinnamon rolls are almost a cliché in the food world. Every fresh bakery or croissant stall has them. They are very easy to prepare purely plant-based. You can find the plant-based versions virtually nowhere on sale. Only at bakeries that already have a pure vegan offering, and there are very few of them. That’s how unwieldy, slow and conservative the food industry is, with its close ties to livestock farming.
We are happy to go ahead and make our own then!
The version below is very basic, gluten-free and consists of just 4 ingredients.
You can also prepare them in a raw version if you have a dehydrator.

What ingredients do you need?

For eight rolls:

  • Four bananas, ripe but not overripe
  • 40 grams of raisins
  • 150 grams of pitted soft dates such as mazafati or medjoul dates
  • 3 teaspoons of cinnamon
  • 6 tablespoons of water

150 grams of pitted dates, roughly equivalent to 13 to 14 pieces

This is how to prepare them

  • Mix the dates with the water and cinnamon and grind in food processor or blender to a spreadable date paste
  • Preheat your oven to 130 to 140°C
  • Cut the bananas lengthwise into 4 slices
  • Place them on a sheet of baking paper on a baking tray
  • Bake them for about 15 to 20 min at 130 to 140°C until they have dried out a little
  • Spread the date paste on all the banana slices
  • Distribute the sultanas evenly, one at a time, over the banana slices
  • Roll one banana slice into a cylinder
  • Place that roll on a second banana slice and roll into a wider cylinder
  • Place that thicker roll flat on the baking tray
  • Repeat for the remaining slices
  • Bake the rolled bananas for another 15-20 minutes at the same temperature

Important tips for slicing the bananas:

The first time when I tried this recipe, I struggled not to break the bananas into pieces. Hence:

  • Use a very sharp knife
  • Lay the bananas flat, i.e. on their sides and cut along in the direction of their natural curve

Tip for making the date paste

In the original recipe, the author indicated to grind the date mixture with a blender. But unless you want to make double the number of cinnamon rolls, I recommend using a food processor with an S-shaped blade. It is very common in recipes to be asked to use a blender, when the amount of ingredients is just way too small not to make a mess, with everything splashing around and you having to scrape the sides of the blender every so often.

Serve the banana rolls the same day, as they don’t keep so well in the fridge.
The result is a beautiful symphony of different tones of sweet with the aroma of cinnamon woven through it.
Enjoy!

Healthy sweet

Be moderate with sweet. In our Western food culture, all attention goes to just two of the five tastes: salty and especially sweet.
Preferably use wholesome sweeteners such as fruit, dried fruit, and only then cereal syrups and sweeteners such as agave or maple syrup and concentrated fruit juices such as apple juice. Coconut blossom sugar is also fine.
If you do opt for cane sugar, take the unrefined version. White, refined sugars like granulated sugar (from beetroot) or white icing sugar are really not done for your health.
In most recipes found in cookbooks, the amount of sugar is usually excessive. From my own experience, you can easily reduce the amount of sweet by half for the same eating pleasure.

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Picture of glass jars filled with fig jam

Healthy jam

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Yoga Kitchen – Simple, healthy, and plant-based

A precious gift from Indian Summer

Fruit, at least with the exception of tropical regions, is only available during a short period of the year. It is late summer, the transition between summer and autumn. Fruit is harvested and the fruits are ripe and can be picked. According to the Eastern view of energy and the seasons, it is one of the four transitions between the four major seasons where the earth energy is most strongly tangible.
Sometimes the harvest is so exuberant that it is impossible to eat all that fruit before it spoils.

What are the nutritional benefits of fruit?

Fruit is a great gift from nature. It contains:

  • Water
  • Vitamins
  • Minerals
  • Fibres
  • Plenty of carbohydrates, much of which are relatively fast-absorbing sugars

Fruit contains little protein and almost no fats.
If you eat the fruit whole, the absorption of sugars slows down somewhat. It is much healthier for maintaining healthy blood sugar levels than drinking fruit juice.
Read more information on the best way to enjoy fruit here.

How best to store fruit?

We can preserve vegetables over the long term in a very eco-friendly way through the lacto-fermentation process. However, fermentation of fruits is more difficult. It is a delicate matter. Because they are packed with natural sugars, which results in alcohol being produced by the fermentation processes.
To preserve fruit in an environmentally responsible way, you can use one of the following techniques, for example:

  • Storage in a naturally cool room (such as a cellar or basement). This can only be done for certain types of (hard) fruit.
  • Cooking and then sterilising. This was popular with our grandparents.
  • Drying or dehydrating.
  • Making jam or jelly.

Our grandparents stored their apples almost all winter by stacking them on racks at regular intervals in the cellar.
Sterilisation is associated with loss of nutritional value. Vitamins and enzymes are broken down by intense heat.
Drying or dehydrating fruit is very suitable for hot, dry southern regions. Hot air or the sun is used for this purpose. Here at home, even with climate change, really dry summer heat is rare and unpredictable. We need to use a dehydrator. Dehydration extracts the water from the fruit. If it is done at a temperature below 42°c, the nutritional value of the fruit remains almost intact.

And then there is jam, or confiture, as the French say.

The classic way of making jam was by cooking the fruit with 1 kilogram of sugar for 1 kilogram of fruit. And then, possibly depending on the type of fruit, one could add a binder or thickener such as pectin. There is then such an excess of sugar in the jam that bacteria and yeasts do not survive, and this will keep the fruit from spoiling.
The cooking process used to take a long time, which is not necessary at all.
In my youth, people used plain white, refined beet sugar for jam. Even today, people apply that principle for the commercial, classic jams you find in supermarkets. Only in organic shops can you find jams sweetened in a healthier and alternative way, totally omitting artificial chemical sweeteners such as aspartame.

Here is a much healthier alternative for preparing your own, homemade jam. You can apply this to the fruit from your own garden or when you have a large quantity of fresh, organically grown fruit at your hand.

What you need

  • One kilogram of fresh, washed and cut fruit
  • 300 ml of concentrated apple juice
  • The juice of one or two lemons
  • 4 to 6 grams of powdered agar-agar
  • A small amount of water

This is how you proceed

  • Bring the chopped fruit together with the water to the boil.
  • Let it continue to simmer on a low heat until the fruit becomes soft.
  • Add the concentrated apple juice and bring to the boil again.
  • Next, pour in the lemon juice.
  • Stir in the agar-agar and mix well.
  • Leave to simmer gently for another 2 to 3 minutes.
  • Turn off the heat and if wanted and necessary, mix the fruit mass to a homogeneous texture with a hand blender.
  • Spoon the jam into cleaned glass jars. Immediately screw on the lid.
  • Let cool and then store the jars of jam in a cool, dark place.

The amount of agar agar depends a little on how firm you want the jam to be. Manufacturers state the dosage on the packaging. For a firm, jelly-like thickness, use about four to six grams of agar agar per litre of liquid.
The lemon juice provides a acid note in terms of flavour. It also has the advantage of making the environment of the jam a little more acidic, which further improves the shelf life of your jam.
Once you have opened a jar, store it in the refrigerator.
Bon appétit!

Why is eating according to the seasons better?

We live in a society where we have fresh fruit available all year round, because it is hauled in from all over the world, from all latitudes and often by plane. Therefore, this results in a huge hidden carbon footprint for those products.
Also, our food culture disrespects the connection with the seasons. And that is a pity, because eating according to the seasons ensures, that you are better in harmony with the energy of your environment. Our bodies also go through an energetic cycle every year, making it more beneficial to consume or not consume certain types of food depending on the period of the year. The excess of sweet and high-calorie fruits does not happen to come by coincidence just before the winter period, when food is scarce. Thus, the body had access to an excess of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients before entering the scarcity of winter.

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