Question
David Weinberger
When dicing uniform sized food products there seems to be a lot of waste, like when you square up tomato or zucchini slices. What do you do with the smaller vegetable pieces to avoid waste?
Answer
When we're doing different things in, um, you know, in fine dining and if we're doing things for assignments as well, you typically want to have that very uniform cut to be able to make sure that everything's cooking at the same um, time. Uh, so you do end up with some scraps from that. Now the number one thing that I use is, um, use 'em for is stalks. So I'll keep like a Ziploc baggie in my freezer and I'll add all my scraps into that baggie. Um, and then when it fills up, I'll make put it into a pot and fill it up with water, bring it to a boil. As soon as it boils, I bring it down to a simmer and simmer it for about an hour. And that after I strain that off ends up with a a no sodium vegetable stock. That's wonderful to be able to use for all kinds of different things from making soups to cooking with them, to doing the no oil sautes, wonderful ways to be able to, you know, utilize those uh, scraps. Um, the other thing you can do is to be able to add some of those things into other dishes, you know, so you can cook with them, um, in other dishes if you want to. But uh, you know, the stalks are an easy way to be able to use those things like the zucchini, the tomatoes, all those and just freeze 'em as well, um, to be able to get, uh, those smaller vegetable pieces and avoid the waste completely. Now a lot of people are like, well what about all the stuff that you use in the stock afterward? You've pretty much drained all the nutrients out of those little pieces after you've boiled them and then simmer them for that long. So it's um, best just to discard those when you're done, um, because you've utilized them, you've used, uh, all the nutrients and all the work that's out of 'em as well.
