When we cook, we tend to only use part of each ingredient, leaving skins, stalks, fronds or peels unused and throwing away roughly a quarter of what we buy. But there's a lot of flavor potential in those scraps, and with a little creativity and some simple tricks it's easy to unlock. Using as much of each ingredient as you can helps you reduce your carbon footprint, but also helps save money on groceries too, making it a win-win for you and the environment.
There are many different ways to repurpose food scraps that might otherwise end up in the bin, including dehydration, making sauces and pestos, quick pickling, soup stocks, and fermentation. I've been teaching classes on reducing food waste for years, and fermentation is always one of the processes that students get most excited about. Here I have pulled together some of my students' favorite fermentation tricks for reducing waste in the kitchen. I call these pickles, vinegars, drinks and seasoning "scrappy ferments" as a fun way to showcase creative low waste cooking.
