Welcome to Cook Like a Pro, in which we ask some of our favorite chefs for their essential techniques, along with advice on fearlessly frying, flipping, seasoning, and more.
Long before Dan Barber led the charge on the food-waste crusade, line cooks have been scrappy about using every last scrap (hello, profit margin). Now it’s time you stopped throwing away half of what’s in your vegetable drawer. We asked Abra Berens, the chef at Stock in Chicago (a café that, because of its location inside a produce market, specializes in making deliciousness from on-the-verge ingredients), to teach you how to make something lovely from the wilty, frosty depths of your fridge and freezer. Below, Berens shares more ways to save.
“My favorite thing to do is make herb oils. It's as simple as putting parsley, olive oil, salt, and lemon juice in a blender and blending it until it’s this lovely bright green—slightly more viscous than an olive-oil texture. Put a slick of olive oil on top—that’ll keep it from oxidizing—keep it in your fridge, and use it in place of fresh herbs as a foil to richer, heavier dishes. You’re actually just using garbage to make your food better.”
“I’ll often buy half-and-half because I want it in my coffee, then I’m not at home to drink coffee in the morning. So I’ll make milk jam out of it, which is basically like making sweetened condensed milk. You just have to add some baking soda and sugar. I also like to make milk ices: basically granita-meets-sherbet. It’s good on top of either fresh fruit in the summer or stewed fruit in the wintertime. Cream you can always turn into butter—that’s the oldest preservation method in the book. All of these things will eventually go off on their own, but it buys you time.”
“If you roast a chicken, and you don’t make stock out of the bones, it seems very silly to me.”
“If I’m going to eat an orange, I’ll zest the orange first and freeze the zest, and then I’ll peel the orange and eat the orange itself. That’s when I’m really doing it right.”
"Save the pickle liquid from all pickled products in your fridge. Then, when you have some vegetables that should really be used up, you can easily bring the brine to a boil, pour it over the veg, and have a refrigerator pickle to use later."