Written by John Immel, Asheville, NCRecipes, as tasty as they are, are designed just like herb formulas in Ayurveda. Food is medicine. Ayurvedic practitioners are adept at crafting tasty formulas (recipes) for the benefit of their clients. After tasting one of these delicious creations, you may be wondering, how do they do it? Our Ayurveda cooking class shows you how!

Crafting your own recipes can seem like a mystical or magical talent, a knack you're born with or without. The fact couldn't be further from the truth. Designing recipes for taste and medicinal effect is a skill you can acquire through a bit of training. The skill is both fun to learn and even more fun to eat. You'll find that in Ayurveda, the better the food tastes, the healthier it is for you.

Naturally, artistic vision is one essential part of this creative process. You close your eyes and envision what you want to eat. But as necessary as this is, artistic vision isn't sufficient to create a delicious recipe. You need a technique to pull it all together, to compose the recipe. The thoughtful composition of recipes is essential to your skill in wielding food as medicine.

Experienced artists don't just sit down to create; they form a plan, organize the basic elements, and arrange the pieces and parts they have envisioned. Architects, composers, painters and photographers all study composition. They are aware of certain key elements in their vision - the structure of the their design. A photographer knows where to position their subjects. An painter knows which colors will evoke which feelings. An architect is master of building materials, and knows their strengths and properties.

Similarly, a chef must also study the basic building blocks of recipes, something we specialize in at the Joyful Belly School of Ayurveda. We give our students a method to design recipes. Once you begin to see the composition behind recipes, complex recipes seem simpler and easier to remember. With this method, you too can design incredibly complex meals without it being overdone or garish. There's nothing worse than creativity gone wild when it comes to food - all the flavor is lost in the overwhelm. Good art and medicine is simple, yet subtle and profound.

Why Learn this Simple Technique?

Have you ever flipped through the pages of a recipe book, found something tantalizing, only to find the ingredients are missing in your cupboard? Or that they are mismatched to your body type? Or, that you like the idea of the recipe but you may not like a particular ingredient?

Once you know how recipes are designed as a whole, how they are composed, you can easily swap out ingredients. You can adapt the recipe to a very similar result uniquely suited to you, balancing the qualities of foods that might normally be problematic for you. The composition helps you think strategically about the recipe.

Composition helps you to see the recipe as an expression of an idea, rather than a specific formula. In addition to crafting deliciousness, when you can see the composition of a recipe behind the particular ingredients, the recipe becomes modular - meaning you can remove and insert components according to your fancy and constitution. Composition reveals the reason why certain ingredients have been included, and how it all fits together. Here's how we do it.

How to Compose Your First Recipe

In the cooking class, we'll explain the building blocks of composing a recipe. Next, we'll provide a worksheet you can download to create your own recipes. For more info click the button below.

TAKE THE COOKING CLASS

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