Book Review: Energy Vegan

We have known for a long time that food can give you energy. But that culinary formulas and principles are also bound to this is quite new to us. Chef and cooking teacher Alexander Gershberg will teach you all about it in his cookbook Energy Vegan.

We know Gershberg from his previously published cookbook Vegan for friends, in which he travels through the kitchens of his Russian mother, his Israeli grandmother and the Middle Eastern cuisine with which he himself grown up. In this book he already talks about his ideas about nutrition, but in Energy Vegan this is even more evident.

Cooking according to energy types

The chef cooks according to the energy types yin and yang and the five elements water, fire, metal, wood and earth. That sounds complicated, but he will explain it to you in detail in the introduction. Yin, for example, stands for all the ascending, upward and spreading, like green leafy vegetables that grow towards the sun. Yang is more downward, inward and astringent, like vegetables from the ground. According to Gershberg, there is nothing in the world that is pure yin or pure yang, including foods. He therefore divides them into five subcategories, each of which refers to its own type of energy. Light stands for wood or tree, energizing for fire, relaxing for earth, powerful for metal and deep for water. The chapters in the cookbook are named after these subcategories.

You will not find substitutes for meat, fish or cheese in the cookbook. However, there are many pure, vegetable recipes with vegetables, legumes and herbs. Think of a light salad of haricots verts and seaweed with almond cream, lotus root with tofut tartare in tempura, a hearty Tel Aviv salad and a fresh spring broth with Chinese cabbage. Fermenting food, as is done with kimchi or miso paste, is also explained.

The vegetable recipes in this cookbook sound culinary â € “and they are. Yet Gershberg knows how to explain it to you in an easy and accessible way. It is something different from those common smoothie bowls or energy balls. A disadvantage (or advantage, just how you look at it) is that you have to pay a visit to the health food store anyway if you want to put a dish from Energy Vegan on the table. Almost every recipe contains ingredients that you will not find in the supermarket around the corner. Gershberg has also taken this into account: in the back of the book you will find an explanation of the lesser-known ingredients, but also information about where you can get them. That way he saved you another search.