Kampachi crudo.
Photo: Courtesy of Corima
Such are the realities of running a restaurant kitchen that food will be wasted. Of the nearly 4 million tons of food wasted in this city each year, approximately 20 percent comes from restaurants. To bring awareness to the issue, a dozen restaurants are this week participating in an initiative called Make Food Not Waste Restaurant Week, vowing to go zero-waste for the week and running special dishes that are designed to showcase novel ways to reuse ingredients. Below are five such dishes — grits made of corn husks, squash-juice sorbet, fish-head empanadas among them — with explanations and insights from the participating chefs.
To start with these two dishes, chef Fidel Caballero’s staff breaks down an entire kampachi: The filet becomes a crudo (pictured above), served with mushrooms, fermented husk-cherry salsa, celtuce and chicharrón furikake. The fish bones, meanwhile, are smoked, dried, and turned into a jus for an empanada made with meat from the fish head and collar along with mushrooms, foie gras, celery root, and quelites, a wild green foraged in Mexico.
Lobsters with their shells, oranges with their peels, and leftover rice star here. The lobster dip has butter-poached meat finished with lobster-butter maltese (a citrusy hollandaise), chopped chives, yuzu gelee, celery, and shichimi pepper. To make it, chef Takahiro Sakaeda extracts the lobster meat from the shells and poaches it in butter. Then he infuses the butter with reserved shells, as well as blood-orange peels, and uses it all to make the sauce. Crisp rice chips are made with unserved sushi rice, boiled into a paste, spread thinly, dehydrated, and fried.
Jaye Witham, chef at this Cobble Hill wine bar (and sister to Rhodora, the city’s original no-waste destination), decided to utilize the entire ear of corn — from husk to kernel to cob — to make grits. The grits themselves are made of corn husk; the kernels are roasted, and the cob gets turned into a purée. The corn is finished with charred nectarines, Jimmy Nardello peppers and micro cilantro, a garnish that’s been swiped from other menu items so as to further reduce waste.
“When cooking in a restaurant, especially fine-dining, there is a lot of waste,” says Musket Room chef Camari Mick. “For example, sometimes there needs to be a specific cut for vegetables. As chefs, it is our responsibility to not have obscene amounts of waste.” For her No Waste recipe, Mick juices a whole butternut squash, then takes the remaining pulp, blends it until it’s smooth, freezes it, and turns it into a sorbet with a Pacojet. “It’s really a frozen butternut-squash-maple purée,” she explains, “but it has the consistency of a sorbet.”
Chefs love a perfect dice, but the hidden side of showcase knifework is lots of leftover trim. Chef Aidan O’Neal goes through four to eight quarts of cubed apples per service for his Waldorf salad and a crab-and-avocado appetizer. O’Neal turns the scraps into apple cake, served at breakfast and brunch. “We pay for our waste to be picked up by the pound,” he says, “and it’s far more beneficial if the food we buy, store, transform, and cook leaves through the front door of the restaurant in a satisfied guest, rather than out the back door and into a garbage truck.”
Photographs courtesy of Corima, Nami Nori, June, The Musket Room, Le Crocodile
