The Prep List: Chapter 6
On sustainable kitchens, green stars, and a few lovely condiment recipes
Hello and welcome back to The Recovering Line Cook. This week I’m sending you the latest instalment of my serialised “cookbook” The Prep List, the series in which I’m sharing all my favourite ideas and recipes as I’ve learned from my career as a restaurant cook in the Nordics.
This week’s edition is different and starts with a free to read insight into what we did to be a bit more sustainable at one of my former restaurants, before I move on below the paywall to share a few of my favourite sauce and condiment recipes.
As always, if you want to read all my writing and recipes, please become a paid subscriber.
The most obvious reminders are the two bins in front of me at my work station.
Now, by “bin” I mean small plastic container that, good little line cook that I am, I have set up so I can quickly put any trash in them. This saves me the few seconds it would take to turn and walk two steps to the real trash can in the corner of the kitchen.
The fact I have two bins is the start of our story today.
In my left hand bin I’m putting everything I couldn’t possibly have any use for again. Plastic wrapping from the top of that new jar of squid ink, broken rubber bands from that bunch of asparagus earlier, tissue paper I mopped up some turbot guts with, that kind of thing.
In my right hand bin, however, I’m putting things, specifically vegetable peels and trimmings, that we might just eke further life from. This week we have committed to using any and all such things, where appropriate, to make a “no-waste” veg broth for lunch guests as a welcome snack.
Yes, I admit, occasionally the bins get mixed up and I need to fish out a bottle cap or two before we get the broth going, but it’s a small effort for making the very most of the beautiful ingredients we use.
It feels like the right thing to do.
OK. What I’ve shared there is my memory of a very normal day at a restaurant I used to work at in Stockholm, Sweden. A restaurant called Oaxen Krog and Slip.
Everyday efforts such as our no-waste broth were the tip of the Wallenberg when it came to thinking sustainably and cutting down on waste at Oaxen.
I’ll share a handful more of them.
We weighed our kitchen food waste twice a day so that long-term analysis toward reducing such waste could be made.
Whatever organic waste we did accumulate would be composted using a specific Japanese technique called bokashi.
Not only did this supply the restaurant with an effective fertiliser to use at our organic restaurant farm, but it also gave a certain segment of my line cook colleagues an opportunity to say “bukkake” whenever they needed to talk about our compost.
Obviously your faithful correspondent here is too intelligent for such puerile humour.
You may understand that restaurants, particularly fine dining ones such as ours, are wasteful places. All neat pieces of fish trimmed to right angles and perfectly punched-out vegetables to keep portions and presentation immaculately precise. But in the years that I worked at Oaxen, I promise you, I never once had a salad at staff meal that didn’t consist of cabbage leaves and kohlrabi slices and cucumber chunks with endless holes in them.
Fancy precision didn’t mean waste at Oaxen.
By the time I stopped working at Oaxen in 2020, single use plastic piping bags had even been outlawed in the kitchen.
I could go on.
I’ve not even mentioned the restaurant premises themselves that were designed with sustainability in mind. The building reused heat from the kitchen through a ground-source/heat pump system I absolutely don’t understand that kept it warm in winter and cool in summer without air conditioning.
My point is that sustainability was a foundational thing at that restaurant. The head chef, a man by the name of Magnus Ek, was the real deal. And that restaurant of his, sadly closed now, was a genuine example of a place doing their bit to be green and not just as a marketing gimmick.
Since then I’ve worked at restaurants so disinterested in how much waste the kitchen made they were happy throwing away the beautiful belly meat of a salmon because it was too much bother to make profitable use of.
I was reminded of Oaxen and the efforts made to be sustainable there when I read Nicholas Gill’s reporting this week that Michelin had quietly relegated their “Green Star” ranking, a complementary star award they launched in 2020 to recognise the most sustainable restaurants.
I’m not going to rehearse Gill’s points criticising the implementation of this green award (his piece is definitely worth a read) but as someone who worked at a place I genuinely think put in the hours (and money) to be sustainable, I know for a fact Gill’s right that the Green Star system was flawed.
Oaxen was one of the first recipients of a “Green Star”, before they were even named as such. Back in 2020 Oaxen, along with 26 other Nordic restaurants, was instead awarded the green clover “Sustainability Emblem”.
Even back then we were hearing whispers about how strange this award seemed. I heard from one Danish chef friend that the extent of the inspection Michelin subjected them to in exchange for their award was a short phone call discussing how “sustainable” they were. It felt like if you were Nordic and high profile/fine-dining, you were assumed to be sustainable enough.
Certainly from my own experience, I find it hard to disagree when Gill suggests that:
“It’s safe to say that most of the restaurants that received green stars probably didn’t deserve them.”
The whole Green Star project may have been implemented badly, but if it now proves to be an abandoned attempt at securing Michelin’s relevance in an age when fine dining isn’t the big deal it once was, I will be so disappointed.
Having worked for a guy that lived responsible and sustainable cooking, and having also worked for people it meant absolutely nothing to, I know how necessary an award such as a “Green Star” could be.
Logic dictates restaurants will never be the most sustainable way of getting food to the table. There will always be more waste in our bin than the one you have control of at home.
But restaurants can serve as a great inspiration to people.
Real sustainability in restaurants is slow, expensive, and unglamorous, and the people doing it deserve more than a marketing gimmick. For better or worse, Michelin have the resources and reach that they could genuinely identify and celebrate these people. In doing so, they might just inspire others to do the same.
It’s why I hope the Green Stars, far from being abandoned by Michelin, might evolve into something worth paying attention to, something worthy of the chefs, like my old boss, who accepted a Green Star in good faith.
But if Michelin walks away now, it will prove what many chefs suspected all along: that the Green Star was never about sustainability, only optics.
And that would really be a waste.
The Prep List: Recipes - Sauces part 2
A Nordic, “no-waste” pesto of herb stems saved from a death in a trash can
This herby, rich cold sauce is perfect with so many types of fish, I particularly love it with grilled or poached white fish. But it is also a fantastic dressing for vegetables such as potatoes or grilled cabbage.