The first steps for reducing your food waste are making a plan, getting organized and shopping smart. The next step — zero waste cooking — means approaching food completely differently, as if the trash can doesn’t exist. Use parts of ingredients in ways you haven’t before. Instead of throwing them out, saute leaves, steep leftover herbs in hot water for tea, dehydrate peels to create spice mixes.
1. Cook Every Part
Zero waste cooking starts with the obvious: eat every part of the ingredient you’re cooking with. This is nose-to-tail, root-to-stem cooking.
- USE STEMS
The leaves of vegetables like Swiss chard and kale are often removed from the fibrous stem (sometimes called the rib) before being chopped, to make cooking faster. But the stems are also edible. Chop them up and saute, add to soups or puree into smoothies.
- USE GREENS
Bunches of radishes, daikon greens, turnips, beets and other root vegetables are often sold with the greens still attached. Toss them raw into salads, saute them, make them into kimchi, or swap them into recipes that call for spinach, like this goat cheese tart with beet and turnip greens.
- USE FRONDS AND LEAVES
Just like greens contain precious flavor, so too do the leaves. Don’t toss those celery leaves or carrot or fennel fronds away! Use them like you would parsley in salads, soup, risotto and other recipes.
- USE SEEDS
And don’t forget about the seeds when you are cooking pumpkin or squash! Roast them and use in sauces, salads, baked goods and desserts; our favorite way to use them is this pumpkin seed chocolate bark.
- USE PEELS
So many fruits and vegetables are peeled that don’t need to be: carrots, potatoes, apples, peaches, the list goes on. But if you are committed to zero waste cooking and committed to peeling your food — whether for texture or preferred color of the finished dish — use those peels! Just make sure you give your fruit or vegetable a good scrub before peeling.
- USE THE ENDS
When you think you’ve already used every edible bit: you might still be overlooking one final use! We heard from many readers who feed carrot tops to their dogs as treats. Parmigiano ends (or rinds) can be used to add flavor to soup or broth.
- LOVE YOUR FREEZER
There’s a reason that a common food waste tip is to make the freezer your best friend: freezing ingredients stops the ripening process in its tracks. You can freeze fruits and vegetables to use at a future time; to store prepared foods for later; or use the freezing process to “cook” them for now.
- BEFRIEND THE DEHYDRATOR
Another great way to give your food long-lasting shelf life: the dehydrator. Have too many hot peppers? Dry them out to make your own chile powder. Picked too many apples? Slice thin and crisp them into chips.
Don’t have a dehydrator? You can dry many ingredients out in an oven set at the lowest temperature.
- PROPERLY PICKLE
You can’t pour piping hot pickling liquid over everything, but if handled the right way, there’s very little that can’t be pickled, from eggs and chile peppers to more fragile celery leaves and berries.
- JAM
Cooking fruit or vegetables down into jam can be another good way to preserve items that are at their peak, before they head into the trash zone.
2. Throw Nothing Away
The true secret to zero waste cooking is ignoring the trash can and finding a use for everything.
- MAKE STOCK
Toss any scraps you can’t find a way to use — onion and garlic peels, herb stems, carrot tops — into a bag in the freezer. Just remember to wash any visible dirt off the ingredients before tossing into the scrap bag, and strain the stock afterwards.
- MAKE PUREE
Turn overripe fruit like bananas and berries into puree. Can’t use it right away? Freeze it or turn it into fruit leather.
- INFUSE FLAVOR
Do you find mushroom stems too woody to eat? Or prefer to eat apples without the peels? Instead, use those parts for infusions. Any ingredient with aromatic flavor — an herb, fruit, vegetable — can be for a secondary use to create infusions, tinctures or extracts.
3. Use It Twice
Reusing spices, herbs, peels and other ingredients to flavor or infuse gets the most out of them.
- ZEST
Citrus zest that’s been dropped in a glass of water or cocktail can have a second life: rinse off the zest, and use it again to infuse into vinegars, for a household cleaner, or olive oil, great for marinades.
- PEELS AND CORES
Apple peels and cores can also do double work. After using the peels and cores to infuse into vinegar or liquor, you can cook the cores down into a mostarda (after removing the seeds), or rinse the peels and use them as a pot cleaner.
- COMPOST
Once you’ve used your ingredients as far as they will go, toss them into the compost bin.
4. Don’t Forget the Non-Edible Parts!
- Banana peels can be rubbed on bug bites to take the itch away.
- Eggs shells can be used as an abrasive for scrubbing pots and pans or crushed into soil as a nutrient-dense fertilizer.
- Use dried out corn cobs as pot scrubbers or as a replacement for wood chips when grilling.
- Citrus seeds can be used to make pectin.
- Avocado pits can be sprouted into house plants, and are also a traditional ingredient in enchilada sauces.
--------
Visit our website: https://zerowasteinitiative.com/
Source: Internet
🌳 Zero Waste Initiative - Less Trash More Life !
🌏 Let's Save The World While There's Still Time !
