Brightwood Pizza to celebrate low-waste cooking during Food Waste Prevention Week!
Food Waste Prevention Week is April 1 - 7! To celebrate, one of RescueDish’s longtime restaurant partners, Brightwood Pizza in Washington D.C., will be marking menu items with “upcycled” ingredients with a special symbol. Below, Rachel Topelius, director of operations for the restaurant, explains how their menu models a low-waste ethos. We can’t wait to eat it all!
We use upcycling as part of our methodology with our menu generally. There are a lot of reasons we do this, with not wanting to waste food as a big part of it but it's also good for business and cost! Examples from our current menu include:
Spinach and artichoke dip. This was added to the menu to use up spinach towards the end of its life in a way that can be easily preserved. We cook it down and freeze it and it allows us not to waste spinach, even though we could buy pre-frozen spinach for cheaper. This allows us to keep fresh spinach on the menu without wasting any.
Roasted cauliflower. The citrusing agent in our cauliflower dish comes from dehydrating lime skins that have been pressed for juice for cocktails so we use the whole fruit! This is based off a traditional Middle Eastern process of making black limes where you take a whole lime, blanch it, puncture it and dry in the sun, then grind into a powder. This is something we started recently, and while it's slightly different and not traditional it gives the same effect. It comes out as a lighter color because it's already been juiced but same idea!
Foraged pizza specials. We do specials with whatever is in season and local. I know this isn't technically upcycling, but picking food near your location that wouldn't otherwise be eaten is a great way to eat fresh, local, and not have to waste because the source is so close so you can harvest as you need it.
Preserved maitake mushrooms. We have a special forager pizza featuring preserved maitake mushrooms. We found an absurd amount of fresh maitake in peak season, so we cooked them in butter, sage, salt and pepper, then we vacuum seal and froze them. We have been using these for the last six months and we should run out just in time for maitake season in September!
Pesto. Any time basil is about to go bad we process it into pesto and freeze it in order to preserve it. Otherwise we'd have a ton of waste with how short the shelflife is for fresh basil.
Spice powder. We make in-house hot sauces. Some are pressed (to make more like Tabasco vs. Sriracha) and when you press, you get a pulp left behind. We dry that pulp and turn it into a spice powder so there's no waste.
Make sure to visit Brightwood Pizza during Food Waste Prevention Week and order these dishes! Also check out the national and local FWPW events.