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Raw
Charlie Trotter & Roxanne Klein
Raw is the 2003 collaboration between Charlie Trotter, the exacting Chicago chef who reshaped American fine dining, and Roxanne Klein, whose Marin County restaurant Roxanne's was briefly the most ambitious raw-food kitchen in the country. Their premise: that fruits and vegetables, prepared without heat above about 118°F, could carry a genuinely gourmet, multi-course menu. Using juicing, blending, dehydrating, and long marination, they build dishes of surprising complexity, each shot by Tim Turner in glossy full color. It arrived at the leading edge of the raw-food moment and still reads as its high-water mark — more a statement of possibility than a weeknight manual. For cooks curious about how far plants can be pushed, or simply drawn to beautiful cookbooks, it remains a striking and slightly utopian document.
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The authors
Charlie Trotter (1959–2013) ran his eponymous Chicago restaurant for twenty-five years, mentoring a generation of chefs and helping define degustation-style American fine dining. Roxanne Klein was the chef behind Roxanne's, a short-lived but influential high-end raw-food restaurant in Larkspur, California. Raw is their one book together.
The book
Published by Ten Speed Press in 2003, Raw collects more than a hundred vegan recipes prepared at temperatures below roughly 118°F, using techniques — dehydration, juicing, blending — borrowed from both molecular curiosity and raw-food ideology. Tim Turner's photography treats each plate as a still life.
How it reads
This is aspirational cookery: some recipes demand a dehydrator, patience, and hard-to-source produce, and the book is as much manifesto as manual. But it captured a real moment when raw cuisine reached for haute-cuisine seriousness, and Trotter's rigor keeps it from tipping into faddishness.
For more context
Read against Trotter's fine-dining volumes to see a maximalist chef working under radical constraint, and alongside later plant-forward books that its ambition helped license.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Charlie Trotter & Roxanne Klein
- Publisher
- Ten Speed Press
- Place of publication
- Berkeley
- Year
- 2003
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Craft & How-to
- Location
- Colorado