Don't Call it Food (or Beer) Waste. Call it Lunch

Chef Massimo Bottura

An Italian chef—one of the best in the world—spent his days around the freshest, most perfect ingredients. But he harbored a secret worry that some of us can deeply relate to. After all the magnificent meals have been served, what about the surplus food, the imperfect, the waste? Where does it go? Does it feed anyone?

The chef, Massimo Bottura, looked at the food that would go to waste at the Milan 2015 World’s Fair and decided it should be used to make meals for the city’s refugees and homeless. Along with 60 of his closest chef-friends, he started a soup kitchen in the poorest part of the city, designed to use the salvaged Fair food in tasty new dishes. That spawned a collection of similar community kitchens, called Refettorios, around Europe and now coming to the US.

On Netflix you’ll find a documentary, “Theater of Life” about the chef, his first kitchen, called Refettorio Ambrosiano, and the street people who eat there. A similar kitchen is planned for the Bronx in New York and then maybe New Orleans and Detroit.

Rich spent grain (courtesy: Allaboutbeer.com)

That got me to thinking about beer, particularly the spent grain left over from beer making, which used to be dumped in the trash. Lately a lot of it is used in composting and entrepreneurs have begun selling bread, granola and snack bars made from it. Ironically, other startups are using expired bread to make beer. So the virtuous cycle between bread and beer keeps going round and round. Pretty cool.

(For perspective: Toast Ale, brewed in London and New York, uses about 500 pounds of old bread for about 400 cases of beer. A mid-sized bakery produces about 100 pounds of surplus bread every day.)

In that vein, if you can get spent grain from a local brewery, go for it and make this hearty German bread.

But for the rest of this, when you have some beer that’s gone a bit flat, don’t toss it, try this fast, easy bread. My tip: top it with nut butter and slices of fruit.

Quickie Beer Bread

(recipe from King Arthur Flour in Vermont)

3 cups SELF-RISING flour

1-4 Tablespoons sugar, to taste

3 Tablespoons melted butter or 2 Tablespoons olive oil

1.5 cups beer

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

Mix all the ingredients and don’t worry about a few small lumps.

Spoon it into greased 9”x5” loaf pan  

Cook 45 -50 minutes, until a toothpick comes out nearly clean.

Wait for it to completely cool before slicing it.
Cheers!