Recently, I had the privilege of training with raw chef Dan from Quintessence: http://www.raw-q.com in NYC. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I thought I would learn a good number of recipes from one of the top raw food chefs out there and that would be an experience in itself but to my pleasant surprise the training offered a lot more than that…

I first heard about the training from raw chef Dan’s website: http://rawchefdan.com/ and throughout my incredibly schedule packed year of being a therapist intern and a grad student I kept it in the back of my mind. Then one day I went to a raw food event and ran into a friend who told me about the graduation dinners that Dan and his students host at the end of his raw chef certification training. She said she couldn’t believe how amazingly delish all of the dishes that the students prepared were. I took that as a sign and used that as the extra push that I needed to further look into this training program. This was also around the same time that Dan stopped using agave as the main sweetener at Quintessence and decided to use Xylitol instead which I was super excited about!

I decided to do an interview with Dan about his raw chef mastery certification program which you can watch in the video below which is what ended up inspiring me to finally register especially with the early registration discount. I was so impressed with how organized and well thought out Dan’s training program was. On the first day Dan gave me an overview of the digestive system and its relationship to food combinations, unhealthy vs healthy food, and detoxification. Dan prepared his lessons and recipes based on their level of technique and he really encouraged me to do things on my own so I could gain the skills that I needed to be a raw food chef.

I still can’t believe how much we accomplished and how many recipes I learned in just five days! It was definitely a no-nonsense training compared to the other ones that I’ve had. The fun part was that I got to take home most of the leftovers of whatever we were making that day including from the graduation dinner. The highlight of my training experience was the graduation dinner that we had for our guests using all of the skills and techniques that Dan taught me. According to Dan, preparing and organizing this dinner offered me a taste of what it would be like to run a raw food restaurant for a day including planning the menu, buying the ingredients, uncooking it up and interacting with my guests who were all blown away with the dishes.

The coolest part of the training was realizing how simple and easy all of the raw food dishes, even the sophisticated ones, are to make OR maybe chef Dan secretly imbedded the skills and techniques into my DNA code and now it just comes totally naturally to me…maybe that part will remain a mystery…but at least now I know why it’s called the Raw Chef “Mastery“ Program. It makes me feel like I’ve mastered the techniques of raw food uncooking.

At the end of the day it feels like quite an accomplishment…but I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:-) Below are pictures of the raw food dishes from the Greek menu that I put together with chef Dan including herb cheese balls with fruits and apricot sauce, a Greek tomato salad, a cheese crepe with caviar, tomato soup with garlic tahini sauce, butternut squash pasta with a side of tzaziki, and last but definitely not least………drumroll…..flan with caramel sauce, a chocolate ball, and lavender/honey/vanilla ice cream-YUM!

My Interview with Raw Chef Dan from Quintessence about his Raw Chef Mastery Certification Program

Pictures of my Raw Food Creations from the Raw Chef Mastery Certification Training

This entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Kinding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.