Fruit Bones

Fleshing out the raw value

Food waste often results from a misunderstanding of value and effort. Our food system hides how a lot of food is made and processed, so consumers aren’t able to accurately understand the worth of so-called “byproducts” or “leftovers.” As a result, the value we assign to food is just the price at the cash register, without any concept of the hardships that get it to you: no sense of where it came from, who grew it, what the conditions were, how it affects the environment, an so on. We are largely disconnected from our food supply, so we only see a small piece of it—and we still throw away a meaningful percentage of that small piece.

Mangoes are so delicious when they’re in season. The only challenge is getting as much flesh from the fruit as possible. Your peeler or knife needs to be sharp to remove the skin cleanly, leaving the flesh behind. Ripeness is also a factor; if it’s underripe it won’t be as sweet as you want, and if it’s overripe it’ll challenge your knife skills managing the slippery sucker. There’s also a ridiculously large seed inside that the fibers of the flesh are interconnected with. No matter how much you try, there’s still going to be a decent amount clinging to the seed. The mess of getting every last bit by sucking on the hard oblong bit is an option, but far from the most elegant.

This condition isn’t much different from the meat that remains on bones after butchering animal parts. The amount of effort to strip every last bit off so nothing is wasted is ridiculous. That’s exactly why most cooks make stock, letting a long simmer transfer the flavor and nutrition from a solid into a liquid (and detach the tenacious remnants from the bones in the process). On the other side of the coin, in order to get flavor into all the meat we’ve cut from the bone, we marinate it, letting the liquid infuse the solid with flavor. So infusions are just a matter of using differences in salt, sugar, temperature, and density to move flavor from one concentrated food into another less concentrated one, driven by the physical properties of the foods and what we’re looking to get out of the process.

Whenever some kitchen remnant risks being unused, we’re asking you to reconsider that in light of this osmotic knowledge. In this case, we’re making a mango seed shoyuzuke (soy sauce pickle), but there’s so little flesh that it’s the infused savory sauce that we’re most interested in. All you have to do is take mango seeds (or any fruit scraps), submerge them in soy sauce, wait a day or three, then strain out the lovely infused sauce and scrape or squeeze as much of the liquid off the seed as possible. Then you use the mango soy however you like, letting its enhanced flavor inspire you.

We can’t stop thinking about how brushing on a mix of mango soy sauce, ginger, and a touch of honey would bring us back to this grilled rice cake delight in Nagano, Japan.

When you eat a whole apple by hand, how much of it gets into your stomach? The flesh closest to the core gets tossed even though it’s just as good. Cider is all about pressing out as much apple juice as possible. What do you do with the pomace (solids post-pressing)? Typically, these remains become animal feed and/or compost. But now we can consider the value of this copious apple pulp as a barbecue sauce base, a pickling bed in the style of nukazuke, an addition to a ginger bug for a fermented soda, and more—the sky is the limit.

Whatever kitchen process you’re engaged in, keep an open mind! To quote our friend Doug McMaster of Silo in London, “Waste is a failure of the imagination.”