There are many cooking skills worth developing as you become the master of your own kitchen. Of course, some of them are fundamental, such as cooking meats to the right temperature, avoiding cross-contamination, and learning how to clean your kitchen and reduce exposure to items that may flare allergies.
Limiting food waste in the kitchen is also an essential skill. Moreover, this is not just a culinary art, but a cost-cutting measure. Anyone that has experienced a longform power cut knows the stomach-sinking feeling of throwing out essential items from your refrigerator. Losing food that could have been used is a real waste, but we usually don’t think twice about throwing out unnecessary items, like a chicken carcass we could have made stock from, or even inedible measures of food we could have used.
In this post, we’ll discuss some methods you can utilize in limiting that kind of food waste, giving you more flexibility and saving you more money in the kitchen:
Start A Compost Area
All of your vegetable peelings, many of your unwanted leftovers, and even some of your rotten foods can be thrown into a compost area to provide an excellent fertilizing bacterial profile for growing vegetables in your garden. It will also help you avoid throwing out leftovers or other essentials in landfill, which is bad for the environment. On top of that, compost gives you the chance to reinvest your wastage back into your own garden, adding to your self-sustainability, a pursuit that is nearly always worth your time to cultivate.
Learn To Preserve Foods
Crafting preserves, curing meats like this wonderful deer jerky recipe, and refrigerating and freezing sauces can be a great means of increasing the longevity of your day to day cooking efforts, and benefiting as a result. Preserving foods can be as simple as adding some water and seasoning to roasted chicken bones to create stock over time, and then freezing all of this wonderful liquid in compartments ready for cooking in the future. Next, when you roast meats or cook foods or even craft sauces, you can use this as a base. One meal suddenly becomes the foundation for ten more, and helps you avoid purchasing pre-packaged or pre-made alternatives.
Plan Out Your Meals
Ultimately, nothing will be as worthwhile for avoiding wastage as planning out your meals. When you can determine exactly what you may need for a particular recipe and how many you’re cooking for, you can weigh that particular ingredient at your local grocer, or ask your butcher to prepare you a select number of steaks, perhaps with one or two to spare just in case. Planning out your meals with a strict shopping list will save you money, and also helps you avoid overeating or scrambling to work with ingredients you didn’t need. Of course, this is a spectrum, you may try to integrate the effort for some meals and ignore it elsewhere, which is enough too.
With this advice, you’re sure to limit food waste in the kitchen in the best possible way.
