QSR July 2022

| FOOD WASTE | fresh ideas

heartier herbs are added to stock. This broth also contains chicken bones and leftover vegetable scraps—onion, carrot, celery—and cooks overnight, then is blended with ginger and turmeric. R removed items from the menu, as well as added them. Shredded carrots in some of the bowl menu offerings added a nice earth iness but didn’t last long enough, so now the concept pickles them. “They last longer, they bring a great texture, feel, taste, and health benefit,” she points out. Respecting food Fat Choy, in New York City, is also as zero waste as possible. Chef and owner Justin Lee developed several menu items to reduce food waste through repurposing. “At Fat Choy we put in the extra work to make the most out of every part of the plant,” Lee says. “So much goes into growing and transporting that plant, it seems wasteful to only use the most ‘desirable’ parts. Hopefully we can show people simple techniques they can easily adopt into their lives.” Fat Choy is a vegan, “Chinese-ish” restau rant, through which Lee hopes to encourage people to eat less meat, while still being omnivores. Lee had a lot of waste of stalks and leaves from his salt and pepper cauliflower. So he now cuts up the cauliflower cores very small and thin and fries them along with the flo rets. “By understanding they’re more fibrous we can fry them and increase our yield from that product,” Lee says. And he grinds up the leaves in the food processor along with stems from collard greens and uses them in sticky rice dumplings. Mushrooms also have more than one use. Lee uses the caps of king oyster mushrooms in specials such as “Fun Guy Stew” and “Fun Guy Salad,” but can’t include the woody

Lee enjoys the task. “This is a different challenge—to make scraps taste good. The first step is to put everything into a stock, but we’re taking further steps and making that into solid food,” he says. What is tricky is knowing how much of this to share with customers and do it in a non-preachy way. Lee is aware using food scraps might encourage some guests to come back and might deter others. “Every now and then on Instagram we might talk about it. The idea behind Fat Choy is this menu can exist anywhere in the world,” he says. Keeping inventory low Shouk is an Israeli street food fast casual with three locations in Washington, D.C., and one in Bethesda, Maryland. “We run at little to no waste,” says co founder and CEO Ran Nussbächer. He achieves this by having a very lim ited set of SKUs and using them to create as many menu items as possible. “We’re fairly aggressive in keeping it tight,” he says. “We’re always asking ourselves what more we can do with what we have. We try not to bring in anything that’s single-use because if it’s a perishable item and I’ve ordered too much of it I can’t use it for anything else. If I have two or three items with the same perishable item I’m unlikely to run into that problem.” Oyster mushrooms, for example, are used in two very different ways and customers don’t even realize they’re the same, he says. The mushrooms are seasoned and grilled for mushroom schawarma; and breaded and deep fried for fried schouk’n. “The pro file of the dishes couldn’t be any different,” Nussbächer explains. “That way we are able to have the flexibility to use the product for both without any leftovers.” Likewise with chickpeas, which are used

FAT CHOY WANTS TO ENCOURAGE GUESTS TO EAT LESS MEAT, WHILE STILL BEING OMNIVORES.

stalk. Instead, he braises and purees them and they add flavor to sauces, along with acting as a thickening agent. This goes into both dishes as well as soups such as stone soup, and hot and sour soup And in perhaps the most innovative idea, Lee is confit-ing gin ger skins and scallion roots then blending them into a paste. “We use that to flavor fried rice or to start up a braise or a soup, so that’s a really useful technique,” Lee says. Other scraps go into stock or flavored vinegars. He steeps jalapeño cores and seeds—or what ever he has on hand—in vinegar than uses it to make a house hot sauce. “It changes slightly in flavor depending on the season and what scraps we put into it,” he says.

in hummus, falafel, and the Shouk veggie burger. “They all taste different and feel different. We have a fairly limited set of SKUs and we’re fairly aggressive in keeping it tight.” Shouk’s menu is 100 percent plant-based, which means, Nuss bächer says, “that our products aren’t as perishable as animal proteins. We have more time on items; a tomato doesn’t go bad as quickly as a steak and if goes beyond 24 hours that’s OK.” Nussbächer also enjoys the challenge of being as zero-waste as possible. “It’s good for the planet, good for business,” he says. q

Amanda Baltazar is a regular contributor to Food News Media and is based in Washington.

FAT CHOY (4)

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JULY 2022 | QSR | www.qsrmagazine.com