It seems more and more people are becoming interested in eating raw. While 10 years ago you were considered a freak if you told anyone that you did not cook your food but instead ate only raw food, now it seems quite fashionable to be a ‘rawy’ which is someone who indeed eats mainly or even only raw food.

Although the basics of the diet are quite simple, you do not heat your food above 115 degrees F / 45 degrees C, so that you do not destroy the enzymes in the food; it is quite confusing though when you start reading the recipe suggestions. Terms like food dehydrator, juicer or slicer are common. If you are new to the raw food world; these are appliances you will need if you even consider the change to a raw food diet. Without them it becomes quite difficult to really make the change in your diet.

To be straight forward, if you consider going on the diet you will need the following appliances in order to make life easy and the diet versatile enough to stick to it.

1) A food dehydrator.
Although food dehydration is usually advertised as a way to preserve food, when using it for a raw food diet it allows you to create recipes with ingredients that are too rich in water to otherwise combine. Think of a nut pizza with tomato slices. This bottom will become soaked before you can eat it. Dehydrating food also intensifies the flavors in the food.

When considering which dehydrator to buy there are a few things you need to consider. Make sure you get one where the fan is at the side (often referred to as horizontal air flow). The ones with the fan at the bottom often produce an uneven result. Get one with enough power and a drying area that is large enough because you will use the dehydrator a lot. A thermostat is an absolute requirement but most dehydrators have this. Price, to compare prices divide the total cost by the square drying area.

2) High speed blender.
To properly juice both fruits and vegetables check if the juicer does indeed do both. A lot of juicers that are good for juicing fruit do less of a job when juicing vegetables; this is due to the difference in structure between the two.

Consider the method via which the juicer gets rid of the pulp, does it do this automatically, or do you need to do it manually?

3) Salad shredder – although you can slice all your veggies by hand a salad shredder is something you might want to purchase. Usually they are not too expensive and really helpful.