00:06In New York City food waste comprises roughly 30% of the waste stream. A handful of New York
00:11restaurants have tasked themselves with rethinking waste. One of these restaurants is Olmstead. I'm
00:16off to Brooklyn today to meet the chef and owner of Olmstead, Greg Backstrom. He's gonna teach me
00:20how to incorporate what would easily be considered garbage into a three-course meal. Let's go!
00:25We're gonna be making a fun three-course menu incorporating some items that would
00:31be food waste and turning them into delicious meals. Correct. First we're gonna
00:35kind of do like a typical kale salad. Start picking the kale. So tell me about the
00:40creation of Olmstead. You've worked at a ton of amazing restaurants. What has all of
00:46that taught you? I didn't necessarily want to be cooking that food anymore. We try to
00:51be playful and fun and do things that people haven't maybe seen before, but we
00:54try to do it with combinations of flavors that everyone already knows in a
00:58sustainable way. Here we have the big living wall that has wheatgrass growing
01:02on it for wheatgrass shots. We have birds and we have fish. Here you want another
01:07knife? Chef knife! Roughly chopped? Yeah. Season it with some olive oil, salt, bunch of
01:12pepper, zest of lemon, and then we'll juice the lemon. And then we're just gonna like
01:16massage it in so that'll make what is normally a tough green not as tough. These
01:20are the stems from the last time we picked kale. We chop it up and we mix it with a
01:24little bit of garlic and onion, put 3% salt water over it, which also has acid in
01:28it that will help sort of tenderize the kale. The greens? Yeah. Massage and put the
01:32lemon in? Just start squeezing and I'll massage it for you. Cool. Let's talk about
01:36how you deal with waste here at Olmstead. We're a very seasonal restaurant. The menu
01:41changes a lot. We're based with new food waste every time. We have to be creative on
01:46the spot. It's an ever-growing process of like self-correct and evolve. So like
01:50when we clean the tub, we drain the tub, we spray that water over the garden. Every
01:55time we clean the tub, try to reuse our gray water and everything. This is like a
01:58very simple salad. It has all the crunch from the kale and the stems. Cover the
02:02crap out of it with a lot of Parmesan. The best part. We make a lot of brioche here.
02:07We save all of the end pieces. And then just blitz it in a blender? Yeah, we blitz it in
02:11a
02:11food processor and we turn that into breadcrumbs. That's it. And there's zero waste. I'm excited.
02:18It is really good. I really want to make this stuff. It's shockingly easy. I'm excited
02:23for round two, which is the falafel. The piece of carrots, yeah. Carrot pulp that's
02:28been dried out, red lentils, parsley and mint, onions, garlic, cumin, and madras curry powder,
02:33wheat bran, and baking soda. Mix it all and then we're gonna run it through the meat grinder.
02:37Super simple. That's nice. No cutting. Can I do it in a food processor? Yeah, you definitely
02:41can. The wheat bran and the baking soda kind of aerate it so it's not so
02:45dense. It smells so good. Great. It goes like that. That goes like that. Whoa. I'm so excited for this
02:55one.
02:56Ice cream scooper. Any size that you prefer. It takes a little bit longer to
02:59fry than you think. It takes four or five minutes. Obviously you're in New York.
03:02Space is limited. A lot of people would probably nix having that. You have a huge
03:06space and half it is dedicated to your garden. Why is that important? We're in the
03:10era where it's more about providing nice things for our guests. I'm not the guy that is
03:13the first person at the farmer's market to get all the things that no one else has.
03:16Like we like to use tomatoes and asparagus and present it in a way that maybe is
03:22unfamiliar but it's still delicious. We try to accommodate as many allergies as we
03:25can. We try to support as many small businesses, small farms as we can. That was a
03:30good salt shot. Take our pea shoots. Hit this with a lemon dressing that we make.
03:34These are grown outside in the greenhouse right now. We make our own ranch dressing.
03:38Anything that's got yogurt in it is what I would go with. Yum. Dish two done. Order up.
03:46So good. Ranch dressing doesn't hurt. Ranch is my favorite dressing.
03:51Should we make the squash bread? Yeah. It's so good. For the last course we have a squash
03:56bread. We serve it with a clotted cream and a jam. Right now it's a Harbison clotted
04:00cream. It's wrapped in spruce and it has a rind and everything. So when we have
04:03leftover you just pour cream over it. Normally clotted cream is just cream that's put
04:08into a low oven overnight and then there's a separation. Some of the cream
04:12caramelizes. You let that chill and you scoop it out and it's super good. We take
04:16the spruce, the wood that's wrapped around it, but the rind and everything else
04:20just gets blended together. This is the untraditional way of doing it. That way
04:23we have a total yielded product so that way there's no waste. And then we whip it
04:27almost like whipped cream. This is the spruce right here. This is the branch. That's the
04:31wheels. This is the product after you've put in your mixture. This is 12 hours later. 12 hours in the
04:35oven at 180. 180. We add 1% salt for flavor and to preserve it. And then once it's
04:39actually cold we just we blend it in the mixer. That's what we're gonna do next.
04:43This part is just up to whatever your preference is. Like we just whip it until
04:47just right around whipped cream. Once we have this we really just simply serve it.
04:52Right now it's butternut squash. We do it with summer squash. We do it with
04:55honey nut. We sort of any dense squash. Dollop of the clotted cream. This jam, we have a
05:00couple of rules that we follow. Everything is made within every three days, but just
05:04because we have that rule doesn't mean we should start throwing everything away.
05:07After service, if it's two days old, any bar juices get get frozen. We save the
05:12husks. We blanch them five times in cold water. And then we take that juice that's
05:17in the freezer, the lemon and lime juice, orange juice, whatever it is. We mix it
05:21out with the the rinds that we run through the meat grinder. Cover with some
05:25sugar and we cook it for a couple of hours and it turns it into, honestly it
05:28almost tastes like Sprite. This would go in the trash normally, but it's nice and bright.
05:32Look at that. Spread it however you want.
05:39Does it not taste kind of like Sprite a little bit? It does taste just like... I thought you
05:43mentioned it. The cream does have a lot of flavor though. Jam changes all the time. When
05:46we don't have this one, we like right now it would be strawberry rhubarb because it's
05:50spring. Yum! To cap it off, why do you think it's important for people to be
05:54rethinking their food and their waste, kind of reimagining what that is? It's important just for the obvious
06:01reason and that there's no reason to just throw something that's completely
06:04edible away. But to sort of highlight that in the menu so we do that for the
06:08dinner menu, the brunch menu, and across the street. Just to show that it doesn't
06:12have to be anything lesser just because it was an ingredient that you originally
06:15didn't think to use. Thank you so much for showing me all this. I feel like I can do this.
06:21Thanks for coming.
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