Raw food enthusiasts, Delhi finally has a place for you.

In Meher Chand Market, Nourish Organics has shelves stacked with amaranth cookies and wholesome nut and seed blends, and behind the deli counter you’ll find raw and gluten and wheat free foods that might be unconventional, but they’re certainly not low on flavour.

Raw food is made from unprocessed and (usually) organic produce, and sometimes cooked at very low temperatures (up to 40 degrees Celsius). Theories about the benefits of a raw food-heavy diet abound, suggesting that uncooked foods offer the body more enzymes and allow foods to retain a higher nutrient content than if cooked.

A “pizza” bore no resemblance to the pie we’re all familiar with. Instead, Nourish Organics version is a buckwheat cracker topped with olive tapenade, cherry tomatoes, alfalfa sprouts for crunch and lots of nuts and seeds and salad leaves for texture. Sound vile? It’s delicious. And it’s hard to sell someone on the virtues of raw almond hummus until they’ve sampled its unctuous creaminess for themselves.

But forget about restoring enzymes to your digestion or nutrient content. For so many of us, loaded with gluten and fats and refined sugars, the restrained flavours of raw foods can be challenging to appreciate at first go. But persevere, because it's not often that you'll get to walk out of an eatery with this sort of smug glow.

While you wait for your good-for-you goodies, peruse the well-stocked shelves: sticky slabs of amla and lime and date health bars share space with trail mix and packets of muesli. Not everything in-store is raw, but everything at Nourish Organics looks and tastes delicious.

 EMAIL     SHARE     TWITTER     FACEBOOK