Black Truffle Mindset
What Vojtech Vègh is trying to tell us
Following a celebratory staff luncheon, a clean-up crew swept through the dining space, quickly clearing decorations and evidence of the 70 people who had been there. The head chef helped, reclaiming the kitchen’s serving dishes before moving on to clear the buffet table of additional food that supporters of the organization had donated for the event.
Chef was about to tip a plate full of cookies into the trash when one of the cleaners stopped him. “Do you want to save those to serve tomorrow with tea and coffee?” Chef paused briefly, considering the suggestion, before carrying them to his kitchen where he slid the sweets into a plastic storage bin.
In the bottom of the barrel where Chef had almost tossed away the cookies lay a jumble of pristine slices of cheese and crackers that none of the diners had touched. They formed a heap on top of discarded colored streamers, scrunched up napkins, and little sticky balls of tape that had held up decorations. It was too late to save them.
Now, imagine a kitchen without a waste bin.
If you’re like me, you find this inconceivable. Even the most earthy, environmentally friendly restaurants I’ve been to have a receptacle with a “Compost Here” sign posted somewhere in its vicinity.
I came across this concept of a kitchen without a trash barrel when I read Surplus: The Food Waste Guide for Chefs by Vojtech Vègh, a Slovakian-born chef who has worked around the world in many hospitality settings including Michelin-starred restaurants and ritzy resorts. He opened his first restaurant in 2017 in Cambodia, also named Surplus, celebrating Vègh’s vision of creating a restaurant where surplus — that is, waste — would be eliminated.
Vègh claims in his book that Surplus was the first zero-waste restaurant, an assertion I have been unable to prove or disprove.1 I had never heard the term before coming across the chef on LinkedIn. But the research I’ve done since reading Surplus has shown me that since 2019/2020, coincidentally the same year Vègh published his book, there have been a number of chefs in U.S. who have embraced the concept.2 More posts with mentions of zero-waste restaurants have been showing up in my socials this year. (The algorithm is on to me!)
Anyone Can Do This
To cut down on significant food waste, Vègh encourages readers to cultivate a “black truffle mindset.” Anyone can do this, whether they are professionals or home cooks.
Black truffles are expensive. Everyone knows this. The market price for black winter truffles when I started drafting this piece was approximately $600/oz. Their even more luxe cousin, the white truffle, was selling for over $2,000/oz! Because of this, chefs handle these fungi with utmost care. They are specially stored in carefully monitored conditions, wrapped gingerly and sometimes nestled into rice to keep them dry. Every last bit of every truffle is put to use, down to its dust and crumbly bits.
With a “black truffle mindset,” all ingredients are cared for and used thoughtfully, down to their last usable ounce. We typically hierarchize our food, with most vegetables (or other inexpensive goods like the crackers and cookies mentioned earlier) treated with low status, receiving none of the respect truffles or fine meats or seafood do despite extensive resources —effort, money, land, water, fuel, materials, time — being poured into producing them and conveying them to customers. The way we treat much of our food does not honor that investment. We cavalierly use parts of vegetables and fruits and throw the rest away. Even if the produce is organic, a more expensive version of a less expensive good, we don’t attribute enough significant value to them to optimize their use the way chefs do with more luxe ingredients.
“Nose-to-tail eating” trended through the first part of the 2000s, giving chefs a platform to raise diners’ awareness about where their food came from, as well as a certain liberty to experiment with ingredients that were novel to many diners. (Most of us in the U.S. did not grow up eating beef cheek — at least not consciously.)
By making maximal use of each animal caught or raised as food relevant to societal concerns about the economy and environment, eating animal parts that once sounded exotic became not only acceptable, it was sold as a chic culinary adventure; even though it was not a new practice at all but a regeneration of a very old one. Many other parts of the world wouldn’t find nose-to-tail as freshly fashionable as we did in the United States: oxtail stew (coda alla vaccinara) and the pasta dish pajata, for example, are just two of many famed, offal-based traditional Roman dishes that have been around for quite some time. Many countries have traditional recipes that use animal parts not typically found in mainstream U.S. supermarkets. Norwegian sheep’s head (smalahove), anyone?
“Nose-to-tail” (or “fin-to-scale,” in the case of seafood) focuses on animal protein sources. Vègh’s “black truffle mindset” pushes this concept to a new level. Home cooks and professionals alike can think differently about how they prepare a plate, from planning and purchasing ingredients to how they store them for both short- and long-term use, then integrating them into a multitude of dishes so that no edible part goes to waste. Few home cooks have the skill, space, storage — or desire — to butcher whole animals to replicate the “nose-to-tail” experiences at home. Exercising a “black truffle mindset” applies to everything; all food, big or small, plant or animal.
You probably have $5 of produce rotting in your refrigerator drawer, so why not chip in $5 to support The Phenomnom? I’ll put it to productive use, maybe to buy myself a coffee to fuel the creation of more posts for your entertainment or edification!
Making The Most of Plant-Based Eating
Vègh started out an omnivore, but now espouses a vegan lifestyle in both his personal and professional lives. It started with getting Surplus up and running, when he discovered he could not locally source the quality of meat he wanted. Dairy products were also hard to find in Southeast Asia. At that point, he “made the choice to exclude eggs from the menu” — as he puts it, “it didn’t make sense anymore, to ‘pollute’ the otherwise vegan kitchen and menu with one single animal product.”
Not all zero-waste restaurants exclude animal proteins from their menus, but a plant-based focus is common.3 They are where you may find brined, fried scallion roots garnishing roasted vegetable stew or an entrée of smoked miso pumpkin (which is one of Vègh’s own specialties). Layers of flavor and textural complexity can be crafted from using so much more of our food than we realize is possible. Vègh recommends freezing, pickling, and dehydrating vegetables and fruits to extend the shelf life of produce and transform base ingredients into varied flavor enhancers. He grinds flavoring powders from items like dehydrated cucumbers, and finds innovative ways upcycle remnants into stocks, purées, and more.
Thoughtful, consistent planning, organization, and proper storage ensure that a restaurant brings in only what it needs, and that ingredients are used before they rot, get moldy or are otherwise unusable. A zero-waste chef takes each ingredient and figures out how to integrate different parts of it into the menu. One dish may use steamed carrots (the most photogenic specimens); another, carrot purée (made perhaps from oddly-shaped roots); and a third, pickled carrot fronds.
We tend to reflexively underutilize fruits and vegetables because we don’t know any better. We trim and toss cauliflower leaves and cores, broccoli stems, cucumber and banana peels because that is what we have been taught. Yet all of these are edible. We simply may not know that, or know what to do with them.
Talk to a vegan who goes out to dine with omnivore friends at a restaurant that does not feature a selection of plant-based entrées on their menu. They will tell you that the plate the kitchen serves them as an “accommodation” often does not reflect the same standard of execution and flavor development as the restaurant’s standard fare. The chef may have been trained to think of vegetables as a garnish, a supporting actor rather than the star of the dish, and not know what to do with them to make them shine. Their lack of know-how limits their inspiration.
Successful zero-waste cooking can mean relearning how to do some things, but it can be worth the effort.
Food Waste, Climate Change, and Bringing It All Home
30-40% of food produced for human consumption goes to waste, squandering massive amounts of resources. In the U.S. alone, food waste accounts for 24% of landfill, which produces a remarkable volume of greenhouse gas, almost 60% of landfill methane emissions. Food waste also accounts for 22% of non-hazardous solid waste that we burn, adding to air pollution.4
Households account for the majority of landfilled food waste in our country. Customer-facing food businesses including restaurants and food stores are responsible for a fraction of food waste compared to homes. The average U.S. family of four discards at least $1600 worth of food annually. Over 18 years, this compounds to the cost of a year of college!5
Reducing food waste saves money, and that’s something everyone can appreciate. We all feel the squeeze of grocery receipts that have ballooned in recent years. The cost of takeout food that was once a relatively affordable option for busy weeknight family dinners has climbed so that a quick meal for four can run well upwards of $70, depending upon where they live. We may be buying less, but we can learn to get more from it.
Inspired by Surplus, I have been studying my own behaviors to understand how I can improve waste management in my home kitchen. I’ve been buying less, sticking closely to grocery lists that are made up of frequently-used pantry items we’ve nearly run out of and ingredients needed to make recipes pre-selected for one or two weeks of meals.
I consciously question impulse buys. More than once, I’ve stopped myself in the middle of the store, package in hand, to consider how much we really need backup product filling our shelves. I envision what’s already in our cabinets and what we can do with that. If I’m holding spaghetti and there’s already a box of cavatelli at home, I’ll put back the spaghetti. There will be more pasta at the store another day.
With three adults and two teenaged boys in our household, snack items like chips and crackers quickly ratchet up the supermarket expenses. I’m not stocking our cupboards with them as I used to. We live within walking distance of a convenience store and a large supermarket that stay open late. If someone in the house needs a snack, they can take a short walk to buy it.
I’ve been saving more of the dry, days-old ends of bread loaves we get from the excellent European style bakery down the street. At $8-$10 a loaf, I run the remnants for a minute or two in the food processor to make breadcrumbs that can go into meatballs or a crunchy coating, and capture full value. A package of bread crumbs at our local grocery sells for $1.50 up to $6, depending upon the brand and unit size. I compound the benefit by not buying something I already have the ingredients to produce myself.
We are eating more leftovers. I check takeout containers stashed in the refrigerator and make sure they get eaten within days. I even offer them to my hungry boys as snacks after school.
Now that I know the skin is edible, I’ve stopped peeling my butternut squash. I have a bag of broccoli stems in my crisper to shred for slaws and soups. I’m used to peeling cucumbers so that they have pretty, alternating stripes of white, peeled flesh and dark green unpeeled skin because that is how my mother taught me. I’m trying to reprogram myself to leave all the skin on. (P.S. For those of you with dogs, the ends of cucumbers make great dog treats! They love the crunchy, watery bits, and they are low-calorie too, good for dogs of all ages.)
Changing up how items are stored also makes a difference. Not every vegetable is happy being thrown into the crisper drawer straight from the supermarket. Fresh herbs may last a few days lying in plastic clamshells; but remove them from the plastic, and allow them to stand in clean water in the fridge and they last a week or more. I’ve stopped plucking leaves from the stems and chop the whole stalk. I moved a console table into a corner of our kitchen near the window. There I’ve started a winter garden with pots of herbs and an inexpensive light with a timer.
It’s not practical for most people to consign their ovens to dehydrate things like banana peels and cucumbers for a full day or more, and home dehydrator appliances can be pricy. I plan to try it at some point, but I know I don’t have the patience or flexibility to do it frequently.
I’ve tried pickling a few times, and I tend to like other people’s pickles better than the ones I make. I’m simply kicking the waste can down the road if I transform trimmings and vegetables that might otherwise rot in the fridge before I have a chance to use it into something I’m not going to eat. I could gift pickles to someone, but if I don’t like something enough to eat it myself, I’m not likely to give it to a friend. I do freeze trimmings and bones regularly and make lots of stock, which I wrote about earlier. I’ll ask my farmers market stand to chop off carrot tops to feed their compost pile (or animals).
I will keep experimenting, to do more with all my kitchen bits and pieces, and savor them like truffle crumbs. I don’t drink much, so I didn’t go for “Dry January,” but I think I may make this February a month to shrink my carbon footprint and F*ck Food Waste (that’s Forswear Food Waste for the more refined of you). Every week I can try to reduce a little more. I suspect that, by practicing a “black truffle mindset,” I can cut back on both our trash and compost. Less buying = less packaging in the trash. New techniques to use more of my food = less compost in the bin. Maybe I’ll finally get around to dehydrating pineapple skins for tea and baking. Are you in?
Want to read Surplus: The Food Waste Guide for Chefs?
You can purchase it as an e-book from Barnes & Noble for around $10.
For the Amazon-allergic, check out Abebooks (a independent bookseller aggregator) to purchase physical copies in paperback (price varies by seller).
Vegh’s own site links viewers to a UK-based Amazon page. You can get it in the U.S. from Amazon here (also available in a Kindle version).
These are not affiliate links. I do not earn any money from purchases made through them.
Do you think about the waste in your own kitchen? Premade and takeout food counts, even if you don’t cook!
Is composting your go-to “waste-solution”? (I’ll write more about compost in a future post.)
What is your favorite way to upcycle food?
Can You Really Zero Out Waste In A Restaurant?
Vègh concedes that a completely zero-waste establishment is an ideal, impossible to achieve in the purest sense. Nonetheless he uncompromisingly asserts that, if you don’t aim for 100% waste reduction, what you achieve in practice is an even smaller fraction of the best possible scenario. If he set the goal at 40%, his restaurant might achieve only half of that. By making waste-reduction goals zero, it pushes chefs and their staffs — and anyone else interested in reducing food waste in their kitchens, professional or not — to be more thoughtful, more creative than they might with a lower bar.
Some items cannot be repurposed. Apple and pear seeds, green-tinged potato peelings and onion skins are toxic, for example. There is service waste, the uneaten stuff that comes back on customers’ plates after they’ve finished their meals. All of those go into compost when possible, but compost should be a path of last resort. In some restaurants, large dehydrators allow kitchen staff to process food waste to enrich agricultural soils, animal feed, or be used as an energy source.
Examples:
Emily Matchar. ”The Rise of ‘Zero-Waste’ Restaurants,” Smithsonian Magazine, March 16, 2020
Terrence Doyle. ”A Forthcoming East Boston Cafe Will Have A Zero Waste Focus,” Eater Boston, October 20, 2020
Elsie Yang. ”Why Restaurants Are Going ‘Zero-Waste,’ Explained,” Open Table (blog),
April 22, 2021
In the U.S., restaurants can be certified as “zero-waste” if they divert an average of 90% or more solid non-hazardous waste from land landfill, incineration (waste-to-energy) and the environment for (at least) the 12 most recent consecutive months. Diverted materials are reduced, reused, recycled, composted and/or recovered for productive use in nature or the economy. Certification is granted through the Green Business Certification, Inc. TRUE program.
“From Field to Bin: The Environmental Impacts of U.S. Food Waste Management Pathways,” EPA-600-R-23-065, October 2023