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
00:15off 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 be food
00:32waste and turning them into delicious meals. Correct. First, we're gonna kind of do like a
00:36typical kale salad. Start picking the kale. So tell me about the creation of Olmstead. You've
00:42worked at a ton of amazing restaurants. What has all of that taught you? I didn't necessarily want
00:48to be cooking that food anymore. We try to be playful and fun and do things that people haven't maybe
00:53seen
00:53before. But we try 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 on
01:02it for wheatgrass shots. We have birds and we have fish. Here, you want another knife?
01:07Chef knife! Roughly chopped? Yeah. Season it with some olive oil, salt, bunch of pepper, zest of
01:13lemon, and then we'll juice the lemon. And then we're just gonna like massage it in so
01:17that'll make what is normally a tough green not as tough. These are the stems from the last time
01:21we picked kale. We chop it up and we mix it with a little bit of garlic and onion. Put
01:25three percent salt water over it, which also has acid in it that will help sort of
01:29tenderize the kale. The greens? Yeah. Massage and put the lemon in? Just start squeezing
01:33and I'll massage it for you. Cool. Let's talk about how you deal with waste here at
01:38Olmstead. We're a very seasonal restaurant. The menu changes a lot. We're based with new
01:44food waste every time. We have to be creative on the spot. It's an ever-growing
01:47process of like self-correct and evolve. So like when we clean the tub, we drain
01:52the tub, we spray that water over the garden. Every time we clean the tub, try
01:56to reuse our gray water and everything. This is like a very simple salad. It has
01:59all the crunch from the kale and the stems. Cover the crap out of it with a lot of
02:04parmesan. The best part. We make a lot of brioche here. We save all of the end
02:08pieces. And then just blitz it in a blender? Yeah, we blitz it in a food processor and we
02:12turn that into breadcrumbs. That's it. And there's zero waste. I'm excited.
02:18This is really good. I really want to make this stuff. It's shockingly easy. I'm
02:22excited for round two, which is the falafel. The peas of carrots. Carrot pulp that's been
02:28dried out. Red lentils. Parsley and mint. Onions. Garlic. Cumin and madras curry
02:33powder. Wheat bran and baking soda. Mix it all and then we're gonna run it through
02:36the meat grinder. Super simple. That's nice. No cutting. Can I do it in a food processor? Yeah, you
02:41definitely can. 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. Ice cream scooper.
02:57Any size that you prefer. It takes a little bit longer to fry than you think. It takes
03:00four or five minutes. Obviously you're in New York. Space is limited. A lot of people
03:04would probably nix having that. You have a huge space and half of it is dedicated to
03:08your garden. Why is that important? We're in the era where it's more about providing nice
03:12things for our guests. I'm not the guy that is the first person at the farmers market to
03:15get all the things that no one else has. We like to use tomatoes and asparagus and present
03:20it in a way that maybe is unfamiliar but it's still delicious. We try to accommodate as many
03:24allergies as we can. We try to support as many small businesses, small farms as we can.
03:30That was a good salt shot. Take our pea shoots. Hit this with a lemon dressing that we make. These
03:34are grown
03:34outside in the greenhouse right now. We make our own ranch dressing. Anything that's got
03:39yogurt in it is what I would go with. Yum. Dish two done. Order up. So good. Ranch dressing doesn't
03:48hurt. Ranch is my favorite dressing. Should we make the squash bread? Yeah. It's so good. For the
03:55last course we have a squash bread. We serve it with a clotted cream and a jam. Right now it's
03:59a
03:59Harbison clotted cream. 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 into a low oven.
04:08Overnight. And then there's a separation. Some of the cream caramelizes. You let that chill
04:13and you scoop it out. And it's super good. We take the spruce, the wood that's wrapped around it.
04:18But the rind and everything else just gets blended together. This is the untraditional way of doing
04:23it. That way we 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 wheels. This is the
04:31product after you've put in your mixture. This is 12 hours later. 12 hours in the oven at 180. 180.
04:36We add 1% salt for
04:37flavor and to preserve it. And then once it's actually cold we just we blend it in a mixer.
04:42That's what we're going to do next. This part is just up to whatever your preference is. Like we
04:46just whip it until just 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 honey nut. We sort of
04:56any dense squash. Dollop of the clotted cream. This jam we have a couple of rules that we follow.
05:02Everything is made within every three days. But just because we have that rule doesn't mean we
05:05should start throwing everything away. After service if it's two days old the any bar
05:09juices get get frozen. We save the husks. We blanch them five times in cold water.
05:15And then we take that juice that's in the freezer. The lemon and lime juice, orange
05:19juice, whatever it is. We mix that with the the rinds that we run through the meat
05:23grinder. Cover with some sugar and we cook it for a couple of hours and it turns it
05:27into honestly it almost tastes like Sprite. This would go in the trash normally but
05:31it's nice and bright. Look 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
05:43mention it. The cream does have a lot of flavor though. Jam changes all the time.
05:46When we don't have this one we like right now would be strawberry rhubarb because
05:50it's spring. 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
06:00important just for the obvious reason and that there's no reason to just throw
06:02something that's completely edible away but to sort of highlight that in the
06:07menu so we do that for the dinner menu the brunch menu and across the street just
06:10to show that it doesn't have to be anything lesser just because it was an
06:14ingredient that you originally didn't think to use. Thank you so much for
06:17showing me all this. I feel like I can do this. Thanks for coming.
06:26Thanks so much for watching guys. Click here to subscribe to Refinish 99 and click
06:29here to watch another video. See you next time. Bye!
Comments