How to Cook With Food You'd Normally Throw Away

If chef Dan Barber can serve an entire menu of "wasted" food, so can you.

Earlier this month, Dan Barber shut down his Manhattan restaurant, Blue Hill, and put a pop-up in its place. WastED, which runs through the end of the month, is an experiment in food salvation—the ingredients for each $15 dish are culled from the scraps that New York farmers, butchers, bakeries, and restaurants typically throw away.

"I can say to you, 'we're a wasteful society' and give you all sorts of statistics," Barber says. "But what do you do about it, really? It seems to me that restaurants can be places of education but also pleasure."

Fried skate wing cartilage with tarter saucePhoto by Mark Ostow

Of course, a guy can eat a meal at WastED, but that question—"what do you do about it?"—still lingers. Barber's hope is that diners will take what they see and incorporate a less wasteful approach to their daily cooking and eating habits. And while nobody—least of all Barber—expects regular folk to go home and fry some skate wing cartilage (pictured, left), there are some techniques WastED is employing that home cooks can easily replicate. I hopped on the phone with Barber to find out what those techniques are.

juice pulp

Juicers all over the world are throwing away perfectly good vegetable and fruit pulp every morning. Barber's advice: "Mix that pulp with some eggs, almond flour, salt, pepper, and maybe some harissa, and you'd have a really nice burger." He's speaking from experience—the Juice Pulp Cheeseburger at WastED is the pop-up's most popular item.

cauliflower cores and brocoli stems

The thick cauliflower cores and brocoli stems that are leftover when the florets are gone need to be peeled. But "it takes a minute to peel it and it's super delicious," Barber says. He slices it as thin as possible—"paper thin is nice"—and dresses it with lemon juice, white balsamic, salt and pepper—but you can totally sauté the medallions in butter, too.

carrot and parsnip peelings

The scraps leftover from peeling vegetables can be transformed into an addictive snack overnight. Bring some water to a boil, add a tablespoon or so of sugar and cook the peels for a minute or two. Drain, transfer to a silpat- or parchment-lined sheet pan and let the peels dry out in the oven (turned off, but with the pilot light on) overnight. In the morning you'll have crispy veggie chips to sprinkle on salads, use as a garnish or just eat out of hand.

Romaine cores

"The cores are the best part," says Barber, who suggests searing the cores in a grill pan just until charred and serving with grated cheese and toasted nuts.

carrot tops

"We're blanching the carrot tops, mixing them with poached currants and a little mustard seed and a little olive oil." Barber serves it warm as a garnish for fish, but this works as a salad, too—bulk it up with some extra greens like arugula.

pineapple core

"They take a little maneuvering," Barber admits. But the pineapple cores we usually throw away are perfectly suitable for juicing. (And you know what to do with the leftover pulp, right?)

leftover grains

Say you have a few tablespoons of barley in your cupboard. Maybe a bit of millet, maybe a handful of rice. Barber suggests mixing these together—"all you need is three," he says—and cooking them risotto-style for a creamy grain bowl. He also suggests topping it off with another item that might be lurking in your cupboard: toasted sesame seeds.

Leftover Champagne

When leftover sparkling wine happens (and, somehow, it does), the only recourse seems to be pouring it into the sink. But flat, day-old Champagne can be turned into a syrup, which can then be used in cocktails, lemonades and iced tea. Blue Hill's service director, Katie Bell, simmers the flat Champagne with coconut water—you could also use ginger ale or fruit juice—until it's thick enough to coat a spoon. As long as the bubbly is only a day old, "that freshness and flavor will be in the syrup," Bell says.