Food

Moon Juice’s New Cookbook Is an Easy-to-Read Field Guide for Cooking With Adaptogens

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Photo: Courtesy of The Moon Juice Manual

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Since opening in 2011, the holistic wellness shop Moon Juice helped make adaptogens mainstream with their widely popular “moon dusts,” or mixtures of mushroom and herb powders. Sold at their California and New York locations, as well as online at Sephora and Goop, they advertised help with everything from decreasing stress to increasing focus and clearing up skin. Intrigued alternative health aficionados began sprinkling the supplements in their smoothies and coffees—and then raving about them.

Now, ten years later, Moon Juice wants you to teach you to cook with adaptogens.

Out today is The Moon Juice Manual, a collection of plant-based comfort food recipes where ingredients such as rhodiola and ashwagandha are included with the intention of optimizing the categories of beauty, brain, spirit, sex, and sleep. There’s eleuthero chocolate chunk cookies, tulsi beauty jellies, spiced apple reishi granola, supershroom pancakes, and horny goat weed (aka epimedium) brownies. If some of these words are unfamiliar, fear not: Moon Juice founder and author Amanda Chantal Bacon takes great care to define and explain each adaptogen in a glossary section, and has enlisted a panel of licensed nutritionists and functional medical professionals to weigh in on their healing properties. “It really explores—how can we feel better? How can we look better? How can we feel and look better for longer? How can we enjoy our life that we now know is going to be longer?” Bacon tells Vogue.

She also features an entire section on stress and how it affects everything from brain functioning to our digestive system. Bacon relies on the expert opinions of her doctors, and also weaves in her own story of battling an auto-immune disorder, now largely in remission. “I wanted to include a high school biology lesson on what’s stress, and what’s happening in your body when you are stressed,” she says. When 67% of American adults say they experienced increased stress over the course of the pandemic, the review—and associated recommendations—couldn’t come at a better time.

Below, a recipe for Moon Juice’s Queen Healer bread, with adaptogens meant to increase focus and brain power.

Queen Healer Bread

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Courtesy of The Moon Juice Manual

Ingredients

1 1⁄2 cups almond flour

1 cup cassava flour

1⁄4 cup cacao powder

3 tablespoons reishi

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 tablespoon raw vanilla bean powder or vanilla extract if you can’t find raw powder

Pinch of pink salt

1⁄2 cup maple syrup

2 tablespoons ground flaxseeds or 2 large eggs

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a 9 × 5-inch loaf pan with parchment paper and set aside.

Combine the almond flour, cassava flour, cacao, reishi, baking powder, vanilla, and salt in the bowl of a food processor and pulse until combined. Add the maple syrup and either the flaxseeds plus 6 tablespoons of water or the eggs. Pulse until a dough forms. Transfer the dough to the prepared loaf pan. Bake for 25 minutes, until firmed up.

Allow the bread to cool, and either slice warm or rewarm in the toaster to order. Anoint with butters and/or honeys of choice.

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