Who Knew Vegetable Scraps Could Taste So Good?
Don’t throw away those chard stems! Photo: StockFood / Kevin Ilse
The vegetable scraps you might normally toss in the garbage can make for a delicious meal when dressed up with the right…dressing.
Chef April Bloomfield calls it a “bin salad” (bin being the British term for trash can — Bloomfield hails from Birmingham, England). The author of the vegetable-forward A Girl and Her Greens, which is Yahoo Food’s current Cookbook of the Week, urged the audience at her talk at New York City’s 92nd Street Y Wednesday to save beet greens, chard stems, the end bits of fennel and lettuce, and the leaves around heads of cauliflower. “The first thing you usually do is you cut the leaves off,” she said. “Leave them on! It’s really nice to be able to respect what you cook and just use things when you can if it makes sense.”
The same goes for broccoli stalks. “People throw them in the garbage, but that’s an extra portion. That’s money you can save.”
At his wastED pop-up restaurant, Blue Hill chef Dan Barber aimed to combat food waste by showing diners how tasty kale ribs, fish skin, and carrot tops can be. He served a salad made of “a selection of vegetable scraps, stalks, and outer leaves salvaged from the waste stream of a large-scale food processor,” as the wastED menu stated; Gothamist reported that those bits were served with “pistachios, damaged storage apples and pears, and whipped chickpea water, which uses the liquid drained from a can of garbanzos.”
“But of course there are lots of other potential applications,” Barber told Yahoo Food. “We made a salad yesterday incorporating raw broccoli leaves torn into small pieces and roasted romaine cores and kale ribs. You can grill the cores as well to get a nice char.”
“We tend to underestimate the versatility — and the deliciousness — of these ingredients.”
Reconsider greens you would normally discard. Photo: StockFood / David Loftus
While we can’t all turn bean-y water into luscious foam, we can follow chef Melia Marden’s lead. At her Manhattan restaurant The Smile, she serves a broccoli leaf salad with a simple Caesar dressing. Broccoli comes with huge, cabbage-like leaves that can be sliced, dressed, and eaten raw.
So here’s how to make a salad from items you might normally throw away: Keep those ribbons of carrot skin, those broccoli stalks, those chard stems, or those hearty leaves. Cut them small enough so that they’re easy to chew — shaved for the carrots, a 1-inch dice for the broccoli stalks and chard stems, and bite-size pieces for the kale — and dress them in something with a lot of lemon juice or vinegar to help soften them. We like to do a one-to-one mixture of lemon juice and olive oil with a bit of Dijon mustard, minced shallots, and salt and pepper. (One-to-one is a radical ratio, but that’s how we like it! Feel free to adjust if it’s too acidic for you.) Toss them together and you’re finished! Feel free to add any end bits of cooked sausage, hard-boiled eggs, the almost-past-their-peaks knobs of cheese, or whatever else needs cleaning from the fridge. And let us know how it goes.
You can help reduce food waste:
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