Off the eaten path

In hotels, cafes and home kitchens cooks are getting creative with food waste. Tomato skins show up in a cake, fat flavours broths, peels have fresh appeal. Of course, we're cheering this change

- Christalle Fernandes

At Mumbai restaurant Thai Naam, chefs prepare Tom Yum Koong, their popular soup, the usual way. There's lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, galangal and prawns too.

But the rich umami taste in the broth comes from an unlikely ingredient: Prawn shells, a usually discarded kitchen item.

"We simmer them, extracting every bit of flavour, and then sieve them out," says Jaweria Merchant, the restaurant's co-founder and head of kitchen operations. The curry paste that gives the soup its texture and additional flavour is also used in dishes across the menu. Lemongrass stalks and ginger skins help flavour other soups.

The best part? Customers love the food. They have no idea that the recipes were tweaked to minimise waste, or that the kitchen has been creatively repurposing food since it opened in 2020.

It's like the world emerged from the pandemic with a newfound respect for what food can do. In London, Silo, the world's first zero-waste restaurant is five years old and still packed out. Celebrated Italian chef Massimo Bottura has a video series Why Waste?, which gives cheese rinds, surplus pasta, and offal a second life as gourmet delicacies.

On Reels, videos about powdering garlic peels for seasoning are viral. On YouTube, muscly chefs save fat drippings as a special flex. Arina Suchde's The No-Waste Kitchen Cookbook (2023), features 75 recipes that use the peels, stems, and stalks of vegetables and fruits that end up in the bin.

So, how come home kitchens, neighbourhood pubs and hipster cafés aren't following suit? Mass adoption calls for more than viral stories. See how some cooks are developing new recipes, training cooks and servers and rethinking their own ideas of what constitutes food.