Tired of tossing that sad, slimy leftover bagged salad? Professional chefs don’t like tossing food any more than you do.
Restaurants have such a small profit margin, they can’t afford to be cavalier with leftovers. And, these days, food prices demand that we not waste food either. Fortunately, many chefs have figured out the best ways to reduce food waste.
Repurpose extra ingredients
Chefs agree: Repurpose scraps and leftovers.
Jacques Larson, owner and executive chef of Wild Olive and The Obstinate Daughter, says that if something isn’t quite pretty enough for guests, but is still edible, he’ll use it for the staff meal. Both restaurants are certified green, in part for their practices to avoid food waste.
“We get local peppers in, and we ferment a hot sauce. Or we dehydrate them and make a spice powder. If you can get a second or third use out of something you’re creating, it’s always more cost-effective to stretch it as far as you can,” Larson said.
Herd Provisions Executive Chef Jeanne Oleksiak said the restaurant has cut down drastically on waste.
“We pay a lot of attention to what we can do with scraps, such as taking the insides of chilis, soaking them in vinegar and making a spicy vinegar out of them,” she said. “We take bones and we make stocks and we use bone marrow instead of butter to make milk buns.”
Oleksiak said she’s experimented with using leftover beef tallow to make candles.
“I just looked on YouTube for how to do it and added various things like rosemary or orange rind or lavender, anything that will seep into the fat and make it smell good,” she said. “I was a little worried about it getting moldy, but the way we render fat, it was nice and clean with no issues.”
Oleksiak said any beef scraps become tartare or get jumbled into a sandwich, and any bits of protein not used in stocks, she dehydrates for dog treats.
“Vegetable scraps can sit on top of a cheesy pizza. And if you have milk at the end of its life in the refrigerator, you can heat it up in a pot with a little lemon juice and make your own mozzarella curds,” Oleksiak said.
“You always want to squeeze as much worth out of an ingredient as you can,” said Kevin Johnson, executive chef and owner of The Grocery and Lola Rose. “If you buy great shrimp, make some shrimp stock out of the shells.”
He uses the whey strained off ricotta for a broth for pasta. Citrus pith and fruit left over from cocktail garnish peels gets mixed with sugar to slowly ferment and then turned into a citrus simple syrup for cocktails.
Freeze/Dehydrate/Reuse
“For the home cook, the freezer can be your friend,” Johnson said. “Say you get a pork roast and you trim off the fat and sinewy parts. Stockpile those in your freezer and then make a nice little sauce or stock. Add wine or water, some aromatics, and you have nice pan sauce after you strain it. And if you make stock, freeze it in smaller containers, like old-fashioned ice cube trays, so you can just pull out what you need and you don’t have a big container just sitting there forever in your freezer.”
Oleksiak said at home she puts carrot peels or onion scraps in bags in the freezer.
“When I have a full gallon-sized bag, I make vegetable stock for soup. I also make carrot peel chips for my youngest to snack on. I just add a little bit of oil to crisp them up and put them in a low oven overnight.”
Johnson added: “We dehydrate a lot of stuff and it really adds those nuanced, sort of chef-y layers. In the spring, we have all these gnarly, semi-burned spring onion tops and we dehydrate them and grind them into a spring onion powder as a finishing ingredient.
“Mushroom stems are dried to use in dashi [a foundational Japanese soup stock], tomato skins are dried and ground into a powder that is the finishing touch on an heirloom tomato pizza. It adds an umami punch of additional tomato flavor.”
Larson also is a big advocate of composting and said the company he uses, Compost Now, will pick up residential compost as well as commercial.
Plan and shop more often
Larson also points to the European model of shopping.
“It’s not very popular in the U.S. culture, but there’s a lot to be said for being able to go to the market every day and pick up your produce or proteins fresh on a daily basis,” he said.
“It’s all about a little recipe planning,” Johnson said. “If you’re just dying to make something that takes 8 ounces of buttermilk, do a little legwork and research something else that will use the rest of the buttermilk. That’s what we’re doing all the time at the restaurant. If we have too much of something, we’re immediately trying to find another way to use the rest of it. The internet makes research so easy these days.”
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