6 Dishes We Learned to Make Out of Nothing From WastED

By Jessica Chou

PHOTOGRAPHED BY ALICE GAO

There are plenty of food favorites that started off as scraps: Coq au vin tenderizes an old tough rooster; pho makes entrails taste delicious; and ramen is simply a way to make bones worthwhile.

When it comes to everyday cooking, however, we tend to throw away quite a bit of usable food. Enter wastED, the March pop-up restaurant from New York’s award-winning Blue Hill, where things like vegetable peels, fish bones, and even the gross parts of dry-aged beef (you know, the moldy-looking parts) were reinvented into mind-blowingly delicious dishes.

“Chefs do this all the time,” Blue Hill’s culinary director Adam Kaye says. “There are dishes on menus the world over that feature waste items. So, we wanted to draw attention to food waste and loss in the food system, in an extremely delicious way.”

Ahead, he shares six easy “trash” items that could easily be reinvented into dinner (or dessert). “You could probably use everything you buy from the produce section,” Kaye says. “It requires a little extra effort, but the payoff is always great.”

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PHOTOGRAPHED BY JESSICA CHOU.

Make A Cocktail From Leftover Juice Pulp
“When you’re juicing, like cold-pressed juices, you always get this pulp that’s left over,” Kaye says. You could make a veggie burger patty by mixing together the leftover pulp with beans and spices, but for a quick resolution, toss the pulp into a bottle of gin to infuse the alcohol with flavor. Kale, chard, celery, beets, carrots, banana, ginger, strawberry, and apples all work, and the restaurant serves the resulting gin with Champagne (sparkling or flat) and coconut water. Who says drinking is unhealthy?

As for sweet fruit pulp, add a touch of sugar into the mix and then dehydrate it in the oven (slowly, at 200°F or so). Then, crumble it up and “it becomes this crunchy, sweet granola-type of texture, which you can top a dessert with.”

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PHOTOGRAPHED BY JESSICA CHOU.

Deep-Fry Those Fish Bones, Eat the Head
The best way to make the most of a fish is to eat the whole thing; buy a whole branzino, roast it in the oven, and pick around the bones — even the head. “Most people never see the fish head, especially with monkfish, since it’s incredibly ugly,” Kaye says, “but there’s so much good meat in there. If you just roast a big fish head, it’s a real treat.” Not up for staring your food in the eye? Simmer the head in your next pasta sauce for some extra depth, or make a stock with the head and tail, plus aromatics like celery, onions, and carrots.

As for fish bones, the easiest trick is to deep-fry them. Coat them in Wondra flour or rice flour before frying, and “they get super crispy and crunchy, almost like a French fry,” Kaye says.

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PHOTOGRAPHED BY JESSICA CHOU.

Eat Scallion, Leek, and Onion Roots
“We have a ‘Roots of Roots’ dish, which uses all the little roots from vegetables and greens like leeks, scallions, onions, celery root,” Kaye says. “They just need to be washed really well. Sometimes, we’ll scrape them lightly with a paring knife.” Just like fish bones, these are great dusted with flour and deep-fried. Other tails, like beet and parsnip tails, can be pickled into snappy sides.

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PHOTOGRAPHED BY JANELLE JONES.

Turn Vegetable Peels Into Soup Toppers
“We save carrot peelings, parsnip peelings, and turnip peelings, and we dehydrate them overnight,” Kaye says. “Then, we fry them and use them as a crispy garnish over soup. You just have to wash them thoroughly with a sponge.”For tougher peelings, like butternut squash, the team dries them in an oven over low heat and crumbles them into crunchy bits.

PHOTOGRAPHED BY JESSICA CHOU.

Make Kale Stem Risotto, Cauliflower Carpaccio
“Vegetable cores, like the cores of cauliflower and fennel, can be sliced thinly with a mandolin and laid out like carpaccio,” Kaye says. This also works for large heads of romaine, broccoli, and pretty much any cabbage-like vegetable with a tough, crunchy center. Dress it like a salad, and you’ve got an elegant appetizer.

Kale stems can also be reinvented as a risotto-style soup. “Everyone loves eating kale, so we saved up all the stems of those big kale leaves, gently removed the tough outer layer, and cut them into little pieces,” he says. The resulting bits were cooked with potatoes in stock, with butter, Parmesan, and some parsnip purée for a creamy vegetable risotto.

Related: The Secret To Getting Restaurant-Style French Fries At Home

PHOTOGRAPHED BY MIKE GARTEN.

Make Carrot-Top Marmalade, Pesto, or Chimichurri
The leafy tops might not be as sweet as the root, but they’re definitely edible. “We make the carrot top into a green marmalade, blanching it like spinach, and then chopping it up, heating it with lemon confit, currants, and pine nuts, and making a spread,” Kaye says. The wastED team also juices the carrots greens for a vinaigrette, but you can also make carrot-top pesto, chimichurri, or just a simple salad.

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