Seasoning Out of Nothing: Dry Vegetable Peels

I am surprised I have not written much about managing leftovers and food waste yet. This is something I am dealing with every day. Where you see food I see potential for leftovers and waste. 2 kg zucchini at our restaurant kitchen misplaced and accidentally frozen and now way to soft for anything. Filled up but never finished plates coming back during our weekend brunch buffet. Too much food left and no one around to finish it after my Istanbul cooking classes. I hate throwing away food and what to do with the food waste and leftovers for me is a question of ethics, of economic sense but even more so – of respect to all the people whose sweat and love the food is seasoned with.

I grew up in the house where I can’t remember food being thrown away. Or wasted. This is why I shiver when I occasionally watch a TV cooking shows where a host cold-bloodedly disposes half of an eggplant into a bin at the premise of “trimming the edges”. That is why before washing a mixing bowl I will scrap down the side with spatula to make sure no single bit goes waste. This is why I don’t put on my plate more than I could finish. This is why my cousin pulls my leg for the sales pitched I create when I serve food made yesterday because I also want to eat different food every day but then at times we just need to finish what was cooked before.

I am in the good hands now. Working by the side of my mother-in-law who is a queen of food waste management. Cheese that by the standard of many is gone will be excellent stuffing for börek. Stems of parsley and dill, two commonly used herbs at our kitchen, get chopped, frozen and these used in zucchini fritters, our stellar hot starter. And so  on. Anne’s kitchen thrift comes from her earlier days as a home cook I can tell. From her own stories how she was able to make what we in Russia call ‘meal out of axe’, or a feast with only few humble ingredients. Irreplaceable skill for running a pro kitchen. ‘Why you are trimming off cucumber so much?’ ‘No need to peel this zucchini!’ – she is constantly coaching me about kitchen thrift so it has become such a mundane part of my own kitchen routine.

Food gets wasted in a few ways: perished ingredients, waste during the processing, food that comes back on the plates and prepared food that was stored for too long and not eaten/used. Each deserves being talking about specifically and I would like to start closer to home here – with the waste that happens at the processing stage. Trimmed ends, peeled skins, at times discarded seeds and what not. We do compost at our restaurant kitchen – even more so out of necessary: municipality doesn’t bother to go far up the hill to collect the garbage. We bring down non-organic garbage ourselves but there is no way to do the same with the organic one (which is 80% liquid so its transportation is extremely inefficient meaning that we’d need a dedicated car to bring it down).

With composting I could have bothered less but few times a week I inspect the trash bin on our counter-top to see what exactly we throw away.  I saw a trend that aggravated during the preservation spree – we throw away incredible amount of vegetable peel. I’d say that I’ve never seen so much peeling going on as in Turkey. Tomatoes and cucumbers served for breakfast often come peeled. While cooking tomatoes get skinned and eggplants get half-skinned. Fruits when served as a platter, a popular dessert in Istanbul fish restaurants often come peeled too. And when the orange season starts and everyone drinks freshly squeezed orange juice tremendous amount of orange peel is in all the trash bins. I agree that in some cases peel may be rather hard and not particularly pleasant to eat but lots of flavor is hidden in the vegetable peel. Along with many vitamins and nutrients that can even help combat cancer, nutritionists say.

So with all this peel we dispose every day (heavily dominated by the tomato peel) I started thinking of the ways to use it. There is quite a bit going around citrus peel – anything from orange peel jam so popular in Turkey (and now you understand why) to the the elegant citrus salt by Heidi Swanson. But then why nothing similar is done with the vegetable peel?

My little cousin told me that in one of the restaurants where he worked they pressed and froze tomato peel, then ground it – still frozen and very brittle – in the food processor. The result was used for sauces and so. What a smart and quick solution! Even though I freeze a lot – in Istanbul and at our countryside restaurant – I prefer not to freeze when I can. So I continued my search for ideas. My well-red friend Marina shared a link to tomato peels marinated in olive oil mentioned by Dorie Green – written with such elegance as if we were talking about not a trash bin item but about an extremely rare and valuable ingredient.

After my research I settled on making a seasoning of dry vegetable peels. In Turkey there is a traditional condiment called tuzot (literally – ‘salt+herb’) made of dried and powdered vegetables, herbs and salt. Like many of those really old ideas that strike you with its brilliance: is that not natural to use abundant produce and sun to preserve summer flavors for winter? Though I laughed hard first time I saw tuzot because in Russia of early 90s and still everywhere on the Balkans commercial version of it Vegeta is a default seasoning every home cook puts into much of their foods.

Anyway, the idea was clear: I’d make seasoning out of dry vegetable peels. So I started collecting the peels on a few baking trays – bulking together tomato peel and make sure to separate it from thicker peels such as eggplant’s so each dries separately. I was simply drying them outside throughout the October and it got colder here I started popping them in the oven after every baking (every day for us). Once the vegetable peels got dried – some sooner than the others – I ground them into flakes. I ended up not tossing in any salt to be more flexible in the use of the seasoning. My mother-in-law added coarse salt as well as dry mint and thyme – as she uses a lot of both – to one batch too. And I guess this is the beauty of making this seasoning virtually out of nothing (something you are about to throw away): experimentation has zero costs and you are bound to produce only something better.