'Medicinal chef' cooks up cures

From a flu-fighting soup to a probiotic salad, Dale Pinnock says his recipes exploit the medicinal benefits of certain foods, writes SYLVIA THOMPSON

A SMALL crowd is gathering outside one of Dublin’s best known health stores. Self-proclaimed medicinal chef Dale Pinnock is visiting the Hopsack in Rathmines for the first time to cook up some food that, he says, will help protect us from the winter cold and flu viruses.

First up is a raw curly kale salad served with probiotic chilli peanut sauce. Pinnock tears the kale into small pieces and massages it with salt until it’s wilted. He then adds the dressing made from chopped garlic, chilli, peanut butter, soy sauce, Chinese five-spice powder and some probiotic powder.

“The combination of raw garlic and probiotic powder offers a huge boost to winter defences,” he says. Nobody can quite believe they are eating – and enjoying – raw curly kale.

Next up is a flu-fighting soup made from butternut squash, shiitake mushrooms, dried goji berries, red onion, ginger, garlic, green chilli and vegetable stock. Pinnock takes his audience through the health-supporting properties of the ingredients.

“If you have a bowl of this soup every few hours on the day you feel a cold coming on, it will prevent it getting worse,” he says. And it tastes good too.

Finally, he mixes in some herbal and vitamin supplements into melted chocolate, which gives everyone that mood-lifting feeling that good quality chocolate can provide.

With degrees in both nutritional therapy and medical herbalism, Pinnock has a rich knowledge base to draw from. And although he has practised as a medical herbalist in London’s Integrated Medical Centre, his interest now firmly lies in medicinal cooking.

“I’m the UK’s first medicinal chef as far as I’m aware,” he says, knowing that the title is self-prescribed and admitting that he doesn’t have any qualifications as a chef.

“I’ve been cooking since I was four. I’ve always been interested in food and from the age of 15, I tried every diet from macrobiotic to raw foods to vegan,” he says. He also worked as a wholefoods chef while studying.

“Now, I mix the best of them all. I don’t eat meat. I eat a lot of fish, buckets full of greens and other vegetables, egg and other wholefoods,” he explains.

He’s glowingly healthy – even after two hours talking and cooking in a windy corner unit of the Swan Centre in Rathmines. “Events like these energise me. It’s the best feeling in the world to have an audience,” he says. Earlier in the week, he did the same demonstration in a health store in Galway city.

Not overtly a lentils and chick peas type of vegetarian, he says he thinks we might be placing too much emphasis on grains, which is comforting to those of us who struggle to incorporate dried beans and pulses into our everyday diet.

He is also keen to promote the idea that healthy food doesn’t have to be expensive. “I live outside Cambridge and I regularly buy my vegetables in a farmers’ market where everything is cheaper than in the supermarkets,” he says.

He’s not a huge advocate of organic food, but says that he takes a multivitamin and fatty acid supplements as part of his healthy living regime.

Pinnock has just become the technical director of a range of herbal products whose products he now uses in his food demonstrations. “My main role is in product formulation and educating practitioners,” he says.

But what really makes Pinnock an exciting newcomer to the wholefood cooking arena is his emphasis on the medicinal properties of certain foods rather than their nutritional properties.

So, he’s more likely to talk about the beta carotene in butternut squash, which brings down inflammation, and the polysaccharides in shiitake mushrooms that stimulate the production of white blood cells than the protein in oily fish that helps boost your concentration.

“I’m more interested in the pharmacological effects of certain foods than their nutritional value. You won’t be nutritionally deficient if you don’t eat foods like ginger, garlic and chilli, but their specific influences on physiological processes can enhance your health,” he explains.

During his food demonstrations, Pinnock refers frequently to biochemical and physiological processes in the body. He is also a keen promoter of phytochemicals – the pharmacologically active chemicals in plants.

He is currently doing a Master's Degree in Nutritional Medicine at the University of Surrey, while also finishing off his first book, Medicinal Cookery – How You Can Benefit from Nature's Edible Pharmacy.

dalepinnock.com