FoodFerret for no-cook and raw food

FoodFerret allows users to search for no-cook and raw food recipes by simply ticking the appropriate boxes in the cooking section of the search form. Try this example search that looks for vegan raw food recipes with walnuts.

No-cook recipes are those that do not mention cooking in the recipe, such as drink recipes and salads. Occasionally precooked food may be used, such as left over roast chicken used in a salad recipe.

The raw food search is primarily designed for people on a raw food diet. The recipes returned from a raw food search are the same as those returned with a no-cook search, but with pre-cooked and heavily processed food items excluded from the ingredient list. Many of the recipes returned will be salads, for obvious reasons. To exclude salads from the returned recipes simply enter '-salad' in the recipe title box at the top of the search page. This will exclude all recipes with salad in the title.

Raw food recipes should match the following criteria

• no cooking of any kind, but use of a dehydrator is allowed
• no animal meat or fish ingredients
• no alcohol or heavily processed foods
• dairy is allowed, but mentions of heat treated dairy may result in the recipe being rejected

If you wish to search for raw vegan recipes simply ensure the vegan option is selected in the dietary restrictions section.

Deciding which ingredients to allow in a raw food search is no easy task. For instance, many raw foodists are happy to consume blackstrap molasses since it is a good source of minerals. We do not allow blackstrap molasses in our raw food recipes, since it is one of the most processed and heavily heat treated products from sugar cane processing.

FoodFerret allows you to easily customize your searches through using the 'my Cupboard' feature. If you would like to tailor your allowed list of ingredients for a raw food diet follow the following process.

Your browser should allow you to open the search page in a different tab on your browser or another browser page. Try right clicking here and selecting open link in new tab/window. This will allow you to read the following instructions and switch between this page and the search page as you want.

• Click on 'Create new Diet Profile/Store Cupboard'.
• At the bottom of the store cupboard section, that should now be open, there is a list of common ingredient groups for excluding from your cupboard. Click 'non raw food'. This removes all non raw food ingredients from your cupboard.
• If you wish to avoid dairy then also click 'non vegan'.
• Edit cupboard as you see fit. If you wish to review allowed sweeteners, enter 'sweetener ' into the find ingredient box (top of cupboard section). The cupboard will automatically open the sweeteners section and you can edit it as you see fit.
• Save your store cupboard, just click the save button at the bottom of the cupboard section.
• If the cupboard section is still open, click 'hide' on one of the corners of the cupboard, just to reduce page clutter.
• Ensure 'my Cupboard' is selected in dietary restrictions.
• Ensure 'No-cook' is selected in the cooking section, but make sure 'raw food' is not selected.
• You can now browse the recipes in the search window or enter any other search parameters to find the recipes you want.

If you select raw food in the cooking section we will avoid all ingredients we consider to be incompatible with raw food. If you have different criteria, which is very likely, use the no-cook search and your own allowable ingredient list stored in 'my Cupboard'.

Note: The my Cupboard feature is intended for avoiding certain ingredients due to dietary or availability reasons, a list of ingredients to exclude that you won't want to change every search. To exclude ingredients from individual searches, maybe you just don't want to eat carrots today, add that ingredient to your 'must exclude' ingredient list instead so that it does not affect further recipe searches.

Raw meat and fish recipes

We currently do not support searches for raw meat or fish recipes. Searching for recipes that contain meat or fish, but do not mention any cooking method would return mostly recipes that obviously use precooked meat and fish items. So we have disabled this search feature and recipes such as steak tartare can only be found using a recipe title search. If there is much interest we may work on this feature in the future.