Avoiding food waste can taste great. For example, you can make a stock using vegetable peelings.
In professional kitchens, it’s common practice for vegetable peelings to end up in a large pan where they’re then boiled down and used as a stock. This is also easy to do at home.
Simply place the peelings in cold water and add a little salt. Just half an hour of simmering will draw lots of flavour out of the vegetables and into the water. Then simply drain through a sieve – and use for a risotto, for example. Adding one or two mushrooms will produce a slightly heartier stock.
As vegetarian cuisine is such a hot topic, many cooks are working meticulously to develop new vegetable stocks. Many are leaning towards roasted flavours for a punchier alternative. In other words, before the chopped vegetables and peelings are boiled down, they are roasted in the oven at 200°C. The edges can be allowed to turn dark brown.
Then simply boil the veg down as mentioned above – adding the odd mushroom, a little garlic or tomato puree as required – and the result is an alternative hearty stock. You can use it for soups or for a delicious risotto.