Hemp Seed Tabouli with Quick Pickled Onions and Fruit Chips

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This Hemp Seed Tabouli with Quick-Pickled Onions and Fruit Chips was one of my assignment I completed for my Plant-based Cooking Certificate. In this post, I share how I approached creating this recipe as well as share the recipes.

How I built the flavour profile on this plate:

For the assignment,  I needed to profile raw food “cooking” techniques. Raw eating is somewhat familiar to me (ie – salads). I wanted to create something that was fresh, had enough simplicity that it could be an “accessible” part of my every day eating, yet challenged me out of my comfort zone.

I ended up selecting the following raw-food techniques:

• Marination to add in acidic flavor notes and to add in variety to texture.
• Massaging to help break down the leafy green kale.
• Dehydration to add in a concentrated naturally sweet flavor and a crunchier texture.

In this assignment, I was required to choose a leafy green, an “exotic” food ingredient and a whole food fat. Here are the main ingredients I chose:

• Leafy green – Kale
• Exotic ingredient – fresh herbs, hemp seeds
• Whole food fat – avocado, hemp seeds

Here was my culinary vision for this plate:

• A flavor profile that balanced out sweet, salt, fat, and bright acid using fresh raw ingredients.
• A variety of textures, including crunchy, chewy, crunchy, and smooth.
• A plate with a diversity of color to make this dish appealing and tantalizing.

Hemp Seed Tabouli Salad

Tabouli usually includes a cooked whole grain called bulgur. In this recipe, I was focused on keeping the recipe “raw” so I used hemp seeds in place of the bulgur.  This Hemp Seed Tabouli salad was a chop and drop method. Chop up the ingredients, and drop them into the bowl! Recipe: Hemp Seed Tabouli.

Quick pickled onions

Marinating onions add in bold acidic flavor notes and texture variety. Red onions by themselves are quite strong. The marination helped to soften their texture making them more flexible and soft in the final dish. It also allowed for a bright acidic flavor notes of the red wine vinegar and the pungency of the onions to come out. Quick pickles are a low sodium way to add in flavour to your salads, sandwiches or as a side. To make quick pickles, mix together all ingredients in a bowl, and let sit for about 30 minutes.

Ingredients:

• 1 red onion, sliced into rings
• 1/3 cup red wine vinegar
• 2 Tbsp maple syrup
• Sea salt

Fruit Chips

Here is how to make these fruit chips.

Before:

After

Massaged mixed green salad

Kale is a nutrient-rich leafy green but can be very obnoxious to chew! This is where massaging comes in! Take kale off its stem, tear apart into bite-sized pieces, and massage the leafy with some fat, acid and some salt, and you will create a bowl of kale that is milder in taste and much softer in texture. In this salad, for the fat, I used avocado and for the acid, I used lemon juice.

Ingredients:

• Head of kale
• 1 avocado
• Juice of half a lemon
• 1/2 tsp salt

Hemp Seed Tabouli with Quick Pickled Onions and Fruit Chips

To make this dish, I took my plate, added in a base layer of my Massaged Kale Salad, topped with my Hemp Seed Tabouli, my Quick Pickled Onions and served with a side of Apple and Kiwi Fruit Chips.

As you can see, adding in color to your plate creates a dish that is inviting to eat.