As the cost of food has rocketed in recent years many of us are doing our best to use leftovers in an effort to cut back. In this guest post, Jamie Oliver explores the potential of your leftover food…
Embracing leftovers is a brilliant way of creating super-tasty meals for very little effort, so my tip would be to go slightly bigger on your Sunday roast, so you purposefully end up with outrageous leftovers to use up in future meals.
Having leftover roasted meat, even if it’s just a handful (remember, a little goes a long way!), is great – it means that you can recreate dishes that would normally take hours in a relatively short time, but with equally delicious results. I often use leftover pork, chicken or brisket to make curries, tagines, tacos, incredible salads, dim sum buns, gorgeous rice dishes… the sky’s the limit!
Frozen flavour bombs
I try not to throw anything away, if I can help it. In fact, some of the most common things people chuck in the bin can be easily saved, or transformed into truly delicious things.
Take herbs, for example – the bunches you buy from the supermarket don’t keep very long, but instead of chucking them out when they’re starting to look a bit sleepy, dry them, preserve them in oil or butter, or even freeze and save them as little flavour bombs for another time. The same’s true with chillies – don’t let them shrivel up – freeze, pickle, dry or make some delicious chilli oil out of them.
These are all easy things to do – pop that thrifty hat on, think outside of the box and you’ll save money and waste far less.
Managing food waste at any restaurant is also crucial. The majority of our menus are seasonal, and available for a fixed period of time, so we’re able to keep an eye on the popularity of each dish and work out what to buy and how much. Inevitably, we sometimes end up with produce leftover, but that’s where the expertise of our amazing team of chefs comes in – they’re able to create fantastic daily specials, using a great variety of ingredients. Happy days!
A generation of convenience foods
When I think about it, our grandparent’s generation dealt with leftovers better than we do. The introduction of lots of convenience products has meant that our generation has not needed to learn some of the basic cooking skills that our grandparents would have been taught.
Take homemade stock for example, it’s super delicious, costs practically nothing to make and means you waste less, yet a huge percentage of people would still opt for the shop-bought cubes, or the more expensive ready-to-go tubs of stock. Now, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with these – by all means use them – I’m just pointing out that a little food knowledge is key to being clever about your cooking in order to waste less.
Which? Conversation provides guest spots to external contributors. This is by Jamie Oliver from www.jamieoliver.com/savewithjamie. All opinions expressed here are Jamie’s own, not necessarily those of Which?
Are you economical with your food?
Yes, I use all my leftovers (57%, 695 Votes)
I don’t have leftovers; I only cook what I need (30%, 369 Votes)
No, I’m wasteful with my food (13%, 153 Votes)
Total Voters: 1,217
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