Are you unintentionally "cooking" your raw food?

[Shivananda]

Dr. Howell started this by saying that food enzymes start breaking down at 118 degrees F, so we people eating raw food strive to keep everything we eat from ever exceeding that temperature. Sounds simple enough, unless you live in Phoenix, but even simple sounding things can sometimes be more complicated than we realize. Like how do you know what the temperature inside your food is when you are dehydrating it? Or when you are chopping it in a food processor, or grinding it in a blender?

Since this came up the other day in a conversation about nut butters, and since I already know how fast foods can "cook" in a powerful kitchen appliance like a food processor, I checked a couple of things yesterday using a fast reading digital food thermometer so I could share specific examples with you.:

2 cups of room temperature sesame seeds (72 F to start) in a Vitamix, pulsed (not run continuously) for 30 seconds to make a coarse meal, the seeds at the bottom of the cup were 105 degrees F. Almost cooked!

5 pounds of room temp portobello caps, processed 60 seconds to make raw "hamburger", 95 degrees F

Raw falafels, after two hours in a dehydrator set at 145 degrees, internal food temp, 98 degrees F

The fast reading digital thermometer I used was $7 at Target, with a spare battery. Eay to find everywhere now, and very useful to knowing what the actual temperature of your food is, instead of just guessing.

[sport]

I would imagine that wet stuff in the blender (such as a smoothie) would be safer because the heat rise would be more evenly distributed. My husband allows his to blend for longer than needed but I do not want to make an issue of it yet because I do not want to make too many rules untill he feels comfortable with the existing ones.

[Shivananda]

Sport, you are right. Wet blended drinks are not really an issue unless you get a phone call in the middle and lose track of what is going on for 20 minutes or so. :) But it USED to be part of VitaMix's standard sales pitch that you could make hot soup right in the blender. It's not so PC to say that anymore so they seem to have dropped the claim, even though it is still possible to do that.

But what I was referring to is how quickly dry and semi-moist food heats up from the friction of the whirling blades. Most people don't even suspect that.