In this video, The Rawtarian shows you how to make raw taco filling from walnuts and sun-dried tomatoes.

Full recipe and written instructions on how to make this here: https://www.therawtarian.com/raw-taco-meat-recipe

This is a six-minute tutorial showing you how to make raw taco filling from walnuts, sun-dried tomatoes and a full other ingredients. A food processor is required for this recipe.

Video Transcript:

I’m Laura-Jane from therawtarian.com and today, in my kitchen, we’re actually in my outdoor kitchen which is on my 60 acre farm, and we’re just going to be making a really simple raw vegan nut pate that I like to call raw taco meat. And it’s essentially something that’s very hardy and it’s really great to use in a raw wrap like a lettuce wrap or on top of a salad. It’s very satiating and nice and it’s just a great, little recipe.

So what we have today, as of course, it’s all raw and vegan recipe. Ingredients rather. So what we’re going to be doing is taking all of the ingredients, pulsing them into the food processor, and then we’re basically done.

So what we have here is 1 cup of walnuts. And if you don’t have walnuts, you can use pecans instead. We have approximately 1/3 of a cup, 1/3 to ½ of a cup of sundried tomatoes. Now these are awesome. They’ve been sundried and soaked in oil which is the ideal situation. So you want to use soaked sundried tomatoes. And then we have an additional 1 to 2 tablespoons of extra virgin cold pressed olive oil. Then we have ½ a teaspoon of Celtic sea salt.

And for seasonings, to give it a taco spice, we have 1 tablespoon of chili powder and a 1/8 of a teaspoon of cayenne powder. So the cayenne powder is very spicy so if you don’t have it, you can just leave it out or if you don’t like spice, you can leave it out. But really, what we want to have at least is 1 tablespoon of chili powder which gives it that nice taco flavor without any spice like spicy spice, if you know what I mean.

So basically, what I’m going to be doing here is just popping everything into the food processor. So my 1 cup of walnuts or pecans. Generally, I like pecans better than walnuts but in this recipe, I find that walnuts work great and usually they’re less expensive than pecans.

So here you can probably take a look here at the sundried tomatoes. There’s some oil that’s coming off of them, and they are chopped. And if your sundried tomatoes are not soaked in oil, you’ll want to soak them in few hours first before making this recipe just to soften them up which is very important. So our 1 to 2 tablespoons of olive oil. So I always use Celtic sea salt. That’s better than the table salt that we’re used to. I’m not—I don’t do things for silly reasons. I do things for practical reasons so actually now I’ve started using Celtic sea salt. And when I taste table salt now, it’s not because I’m high and mighty, I just think that it actually tastes really weird and gross so I always use sea salt. 

Here, we have our chili powder. Our 1 tablespoon. And I actually don’t like things very spicy so I have 1/8 of a teaspoon here of the cayenne and that’s very subtle so you practically won’t find it too spicy for sure because I’m not a big spicy girl.

Now, I’m doing this upside down here. This could be crazy. Oh my lord. Yes. Come on, my friend. What’s going on here? Is just for you. Yes.

Thanks to the magic of television, we are back and the lid is now on. What I wanted to say just for the sake of this video, I got a new food processor because it’s so clean and shiny so I’m just getting used to it. So I got everything in there. All we’re going to be doing is processing all the food up and now what I’m going to do here is process, and then I’m going to pause and then let you look inside and let you see how it looks because processing is a bit of an art. And you don’t want to overprocess and you don’t want to underprocess so let’s just start by pulsing.

Oh god, now I have to take this thing on and off. Now remember, Laura-Jane, like this.  Okay. As you can see here, I hope you can see this, we’ve got it quite chunky which is great. Do I have a spoon? Let’s use this. So it’s quite chunky. It’s actually pretty good because you want it to be chunky. You kind of want it to mimic the walnuts into ground beef size. I know that sounds gross to some but that’s kind of what we’re doing here is making taco meat. Okay. Yay. Okay. So we’re just going to go a little more pulsing.

And I actually, I would almost say it has not changed very much. I would say it’s looking good. Okay, can we remove this? Yes. Okay. So all I’m gonna do here is show you what it looks like. And there you have it. Raw taco meat.

In this video The Rawtarian makes raw sesame seed bars from scratch. No equipment required for this recipe.

Full recipe and written instructions on how to make this here: https://www.therawtarian.com/raw-sesame-seed-bar-recipe

Watch this video for a full 14-minute tutorial showing how to make these chewy, flavorful explosions of a bar!

And yes, that's me in my backyard, complete with butterflies, windchimes and wind.

PS: These really do harden eventually in the freezer.  ;)

Video Transcript:

Hi. I’m The Rawtarian from therawtarian.com, where I make super simple satisfying raw food recipes and today, I’m going to be showing you one of my favorite granola bar style recipes but it’s an awesome, chewy sesame seed granola bar. So it’s really awesome. And why is it awesome?

Because it’s very simple to assemble. We’re gonna combine all the dry ingredients into a bowl, then we’re going to add all the wet ingredients, stir it up, and then we’re going to press it down into our dish and then we’re gonna pop it in the freezer, and then it’s done. And it actually stays in the freezer all the time. You eat them cold right out of the freezer, and that keeps them all together nice and hard, and it’s super delicious. 

So first, I’m going to start by just telling you what is actually in this recipe. So we do have a number of ingredients, and maybe I’ll start by talking about the dry ingredients first. So critical ingredient: 2 cups of sesame seeds.

These are so critical because that’s what’s going to give it the really chewy satisfying flavor that we’re looking for. So then we also have 1 cup of raisins and if you’re not into raisins, you can do chopped dates or chopped apricots. Whatever kind of dry fruit you like.

We’re also going to do about ½ a cup of shredded coconut. If you’re a coconut hater, you could use hemp seed hearts instead or just bump up the sesame seeds a little bit more. So that is one of the dry ingredients. Then we have some ground flax seed, and what that is going to do, it acts as a binding agent and what that means is that it helps everything stick together so that’s why we’re including that in the recipe. And then I guess salt constitutes a dry ingredient. So we’re going to be using I believe it’s ¾ of a teaspoon of Celtic sea salt which is what I always use. I don’t use regular table salt. Sea salt is the bomb.

So that’s the dry ingredients. So the wet ingredients, we have a sweetener. I believe I’m using a 1/3 of a cup and today I’m going to use maple syrup. You could use agave nectar. You could use honey which is not vegan but a lot of people will choose it in its raw, unpasteurized state because it’s less processed. So we do have our sweetener.

We have tahini. Also a critical ingredient for this recipe because it gives it the flavor that we’re looking for really, and it adds a creaminess. So that’s very important as well. Coconut oil. Also a crucial recipe. Well, yes. It is a crucial recipe but what I meant to say was it’s a crucial ingredient because when we’re gonna freeze it, we are needing the coconut oil because coconut oil will harden when frozen and then it’s going to keep the bar frozen to the right texture when it’s frozen. And then we have 1 teaspoon of pure vanilla extract or if you have vanilla beans, fresh vanilla beans. You could use those as well, but this is pure vanilla extract today.

So I believe that’s all the ingredients and how we’re gonna do this. Super easy. Putting all the dry ingredients in the bowl. Sesame seeds, 2 cups. That was easy. Our raisins, 1 cup. Shredded coconut, now this is of course unsweetened, and we’re gonna go for about ½ a cup.

Okay, spoon.

You will notice a lot of my recipes use coconut. Dried, unsweetened, shredded coconut. And one of the reasons that is is because it’s kind of a nice substitute for flour and that it will bulk things up and it’s pretty inexpensive. It’s very handy. I always keep a lot of coconut in the house.

This is our 1—sorry, ½ cup of the ground flax seed. So you may have flax seeds that are whole in your kitchen cupboard but really—actually, that might work in a pinch in this recipe but I like to use ground. It just helps stick things together. 

And I guess, what did I forget? You can remind me. The salt. We need to add the salt. I think it’s ¾ of a teaspoon. That’s ½. And it’s almost counterintuitive to add salt to a recipe but it actually brings out the flavors so even in most simplest, this is actually quite a complex recipe for me. It’s a lot of ingredients. I have a ton of raw recipes, sweet recipes that have 3 or 4 ingredients and that are really easy and salt is always one of them. It just isn’t the same without it.

So as you can see, the dry mixture there. This is so many ingredients for me that I’m like whoa! Because usually, I keep things really, really simple. 

So we’re gonna now add the wet ingredients, and this is the tahini. Tahini, really, as you probably know is sesame seeds which was in there that are just ground up, and they release so much oil. You can see. And again, just in case you were considering it, if you don’t have tahini at home, you cannot substitute sesame seeds because look at the texture difference. We really need this liquid, creamy texture, but you could maybe in a pinch use cashew butter or almond butter that has this similar texture. Now the taste will not be as good because I love the taste of tahini in this recipe, but you could do it. 

Let’s just get the vanilla in there and get that done. We’ll maybe do the coconut oil. Oh, I haven’t even mentioned it. Normally, I’m doing these tutorials in my kitchen, but this was a gorgeous fall day here. I live on a 60 acre farm actually and so we’re just in part of my backyard doing this kind of for fun.

But what I was going to say, this coconut oil right now is just starting to liquefy a bit, and you could use it in either state. The—it solidifies when it’s cool.So right now, it’s kind of half and half actually. So we just need a ¼ cup. There we go. So again, this coconut oil is super crucial and it is expensive to purchase but, generally, if I get one of these huge vats, it lasts me for a really long time and it opens up a whole new world of possibilities for cooking for making raw recipes so I totally recommend that. And I guess that’s all the wet ingredients except our sweetener. Now it is already pretty sweet thanks to the raisins, but I like things pretty sweet. So we’re gonna go about a 1/3 of a cup or a little less, and that’s maple syrup. But as I mentioned, you could use different sweetener if you prefer. 

So that’s it for the recipe, for the ingredients rather. And what we’re gonna do is mix it together. And what I have to say, as I mentioned, I tend to make very simplistic recipes that have very few ingredients like, you know, I just made some drop cookies that are freezer cookies that have 6 ingredients. So this is more than I normally use, but the flavors are amazing, and I just really absolutely love the chewy texture of the sesame seeds.

So I don’t know if you can see that. We still have some harder chunks of coconut oil that just need to be mixed together quite well so I’m going to keep mixing a bit. But the general idea is that we mix and then we dump into our dish and then we freeze. And so we’re gonna keep the bars in the freezer for the  whole duration of whenever you have them so when you want to have a bar, you just open up the freezer and you can cut a slice of bar for yourself.

So I’d say that is pretty good for mixing. And now, I got this glass dish. And I like to use a lot of—I don’t know what the word is. Is it an adjective? I’m not good at my grammar words. I’m good at grammar but I don’t know how to describe them, but I like to use words like just dump it in the pan or like throw it in there because I find with cooking, it can be as sort of complicated or as easy as  you want to make it. And I try to make things just easy to understand and more accessible to everybody.

So we’ve got everything in the pan. I’m just gonna spread it out loosely and I’m using the back of a spoon. I have so many kitchen gadgets, and it’s so funny that I just use the same really basic gadgets again and again like a spoon and a big dish and a bowl.

So you can see that I spread it down loosely, and there’s definitely a place for hands in cooking. That’s kind ofit feels so good sometimes to get your hands really in the food. So what we’re gonna do is just press it down. I mean we could use some kind of tool like if you were grossed out by hands. You could use a clean base of a cooking cup, measuring cup, or whatever but I’m more of a get your hands dirty kind of person.

So it’s going to be a little bit sticky so you want to make sure to do it quick gently but very firmly. So you’re pressing everything down and making sure you get into the corners, and I hope this is coming through okay. Ah basically, that’s it. I’ve pressed it down very firmly and then we’re just gonna pop that in the freezer for at least an hour but ideally, you’re just gonna leave it in there you know for eternity for its eternal life.

So I’m just gonna pause there and I’m gonna take this to the freezer, freeze it up, and then we’ll come back once it’s been completely frozen so I’ll see you soon.

And we’re back. So I’ve had this sesame seed bars in the freezer actually for probably only about an hour and they’re actually quite firm. So here they are in all their glory. They are definitely sturdy and that’s thanks to the coconut oil. And so like cutting any type of bar, not to gesture at you with the knife too violently, but like any type of bar, I usually find that getting out the first slice or the first piece is usually that’s the one you get to—it falls apart and you get to eat it.

And I don’t like to cut everything. I don’t know. I just like to cut whatever I want at that moment. So I do like to call these granola bars. And that was a strange way to cut, Laura-Jane, but that’s okay. So let’s say that we’re gonna cut them into bar shapes and they maybe could have gone—I can feel they’re maybe not as hard. Like I said, they really have been there for maybe 45 minutes or an hour. So I’m just gonna like what I call—let’s sacrifice this one so it’s not. Kind of crumbly. Maybe I’ll put it here.

But you can see that it does stay together but it is a little bit not as firm. So I think if it had been frozen a little longer, it would have stayed together than it is currently. They do stay together. 

But yes, if you are careful, which is not my specialty being careful, and what’s the word? Thorough. See? I’m using a kind of spatula. And usually to get them out, I don’t know what I’m doing. That I’m sacrificing, but I just want to show you—I’m sacrificing the whole dish. This is kind of cracking me up that you can get a bar out. So here if you cut firmly off the sides, you can get a bar like this. 

I think I should have left them there a little bit longer and also you do want to be like sturdy when you’re cutting. Definitely, they are chewy which is what I love about them. Like this is so good and to me, it’s the sesame seed. It gives it lightness and chewiness. 

So basically, that’s it. It was a bit of a long show at the end. I kind of massacred this but I think it needs to be going longer than I left it. And also, it’s very important and it’s a good reminder that when you’re stirring everything, you really need to combine it so that the tahini and the flax seed and the coconut oil are getting everywhere. And I’m talking with my mouth full.

So without further ado, that’s it for this video and thank you so much for being here with me and I hope you enjoy your raw sesame seed bars.