From scraps to scrumptious

Deceptively simple-looking dishes like Som Tam Salad, Carrot Oat Taco, Beet Tzatziki, all have one thing in common: The ingredients. Most of the ingredients in these dishes were earlier thrown out because the chefs didn’t know how to use them. But now, courtesy to Chef Arina Suchde, a sustainable cooking enthusiast, chefs at The Pantry in Fort are creatively using kitchen scraps.

The chef has launched a new sustainable menu at the restaurant to help them run the kitchen sustainably.

Talking about why she chose the sustainable path, Arina says, “When I was sitting and thinking about it, I realized that food waste happens on so many levels. Food waste means different things for different people: For somebody at home, leftover means the unfinished parts of a big meal. But when you talk about the whole supply chain, right from the farm all the way down to the retail shop, waste is being created in lots of different ways.”  

Following on the footsteps of her ancestors, Arina now encourages people to use every part of the produce as much as possible. “In our culture, our grandparents and parents would always use up every part of a fruit or vegetable that they knew was edible. Like the peel of a bitter gourd or pointed gourd was used to make chutneys, doodhi ka chilka was used to make koftas to put in a curry,” Arina explains. She has experimented with global cuisine and known dishes to attract more people to her food.

The chef, who also conducts workshops on sustainable eating, wanted to make it interesting for her patrons. “I came with this menu and also workshops for consumers to try and learn different recipes so they want to save those scraps and make something out of them, as opposed to just being environmentally conscious.”

At The Pantry, Arina has focused on using organic waste from the cold press juice menu. She spent three to four shifts observing the chefs and their prep work and keeping an eye on the bin. “Most of those components, like the pulp from the fruit juices, which is perfectly edible after the juices were being strained, were being trashed because the staff didn’t know how to use them.”

Pulp and peels are considered one of the most nutritious parts of the fruit and so one is throwing away rich nutrients when discarding them. Talking about the menu items, the chef says, “One of the most popular dishes on the menu is the Som Tam Salad, which is a Thai inspired dish. It is traditionally made with raw papaya, but what we have done is used watermelon rind, which has a very similar texture and flavour profile to that of raw papaya. Then we have the Carrot Oat taco, where the base of the taco is made using the carrot-ginger pulp from the juice menu, and we just added oats so there is no gluten in it.” The menu also has a pomegranate mint detox tea, made with dehydrated pomegranate peels.

It is key to note that using peels in cooking is tricky. Arina explains, “The peel has two extremes: It holds the nutrients and fiber from the vegetable or fruit, but if they are conventionally grown, then they also hold all the chemicals from the pesticides and insecticides. Because the restaurant already used organic produce, we could do this menu and not at a conventional regular restaurant.”

The goal is to reduce organic waste, not necessarily by using it in a dish, but in other ways as well. “We tried to make a glass cleaner and table cleaner when we had a lots of lemon peels and rinds left, so it doesn’t always have to be a culinary use. Food products can actually be used for a lot of different things,” she concludes.