Food scraps and waste are a part of every meal, but there are ways to make the most of your waste! Here is the Atlas Guide on how to correctly throw things away and some tips on what you can do with scraps.
Making stock
Chicken stock:
If you have cooked an Atlas meal which uses chicken cooked on the bone, you can use the leftovers to make a delicious stock for your next chicken soup, or just to enhance the flavours of your next stew. Here’s how:
- Place all the left-over chicken from your cook, including the bone, into a pot. Add one chopped carrot, a stick of chopped celery and one chopped onion, in addition to a handful of hard herbs of your choice, such as rosemary or thyme. These vegetables can very easily be changed around, but it is best to use vegetables which are considered as ‘aromatic’ – naturally sweet and flavourful vegetables which won’t break down easily - corn cobs are perfect for an extra sweet stock. Avoid starchy vegetables such as potatoes.
- Add enough water to cover the contents of the pot then cover with a lid and bring to the boil. Bring to a simmer and continue to cook for 20 – 30 minutes. Make sure the lid is on, you don’t want any of the precious flavour to evaporate.
- Skim any excess foam from the top of the stock with a wooden spoon, then strain the liquid into a heat-proof container.
- To achieve a more intense flavour, return to a clean pot and rapidly boil to reduce the volume down by half.
- You can store your stock in the fridge for 3-5 days and in the freezer for up to 3 months. Our chefs love to keep the reduced version of the stock in ice cubes, so that it is easy to add small portions to stews, pasta dishes and risottos!
Veggie stock:
Vegetable scraps still have all the sweetness and flavour in them, which you can repurpose for you homemade vegetable stock. If you don’t have the time or energy to make a stock just after cooking, or you don’t have enough scraps, you can keep your scraps in the freezer. The best vegetables are the hardiest ones – carrot peels, onion scraps, corn cobs, broccoli and celery stalks, to name a few. Avoid starchy vegetables and leafy vegetables which will just disintegrate in the stock.
When the time is right, take them out and place them into a pot to make a delicious stock for soups, stews, risottos and more!
- Place vegetable scraps into a pot with hard herbs of your choice such as thyme, oregano or rosemary.
- Add enough water to cover the contents of the pot then cover with a lid and bring to the boil. Bring to a simmer and continue to cook for 20 – 30 minutes. Make sure the lid is on, you don’t want any of the precious flavour to evaporate.
- Strain into a heat-proof container.’
- To achieve a more intense flavour, return to a clean pot and rapidly boil to reduce the volume down by half.
- You can store your stock in the fridge for 3-5 days and in the freezer for up to 3 months.
Leftover herbs
If you find that you didn't use all your herbs for a dish, here's a trick to keep them for months on end.
Finely chop leftover herbs and place them in the bottom of an empty ice tray. Cover with olive oil and keep in the freezer - use these when you make a pasta sauce at a later date.
Throwing away your Atlas box
Our box and cool pack are both 100% recyclable. The ice pack can either be kept for future esky use, or you can drain the non-toxic liquid down the sink and put the plastic into RedCycle (at your local Coles or Woolworths).
