The way things are going best not to dismiss this one....
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Trace Leighton does. As the co-owner of Origen,
a "farm-to-fork" restaurant in Berkeley, California, Leighton saves
date seeds, then dries them and grinds them into a paste that subtly
flavors trifle and honeycake.
"They're high in protein," she says.
She
also halves nectarine pits and extracts their kernels, grinding these
into pastes or boiling them into delicately flavored syrups.
If
milk sours in her kitchen, she bakes with it rather than pour it down
the drain. Coffee left over in coffeepots at day's end? Freeze it in
ice-cube trays: These babies won't dilute tomorrow's iced-coffee drinks.
Such
waste-not ingenuity is part of a new movement among chefs who are
taking sustainability to new heights by gazing into the depths: that is,
at what would otherwise be deemed not fit to eat. While we've heard of
snout-to-tail, "whole-animal" restaurateurship, the practice of creating
fabulous dishes from stems, seeds, skins and other usually discarded
plant parts gives "bottom of the food chain" a whole new meaning.
Sean Baker, who spearheads this movement, calls it "compost cuisine."
"When
you have high respect for how things are raised and produced, you're
not going to throw any parts of them away if you can help it," says
Baker, who was named Esquire magazine's 2010 Chef of the Year and is the executive chef at Gather restaurant
-- also in Berkeley. "If we're using the whole animal, then why not use
cauliflower leaves, carrot peels, corncobs and cornsilk?"
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