6 Ingredients You Didn’t Know You Could Eat

There are plenty of food favorites that started off as scraps: Coq au vin tenderizes an old tough rooster; pho makes entrails taste delicious; and ramen is simply a way to make bones worthwhile. 

When it comes to everyday cooking, however, we tend to throw away quite a bit of usable food. Enter wastED, the latest pop-up restaurant from New York’s award-winning Blue Hill, where things like vegetable peels, fish bones, and even the gross parts of dry-aged beef (you know, the moldy-looking parts) get reinvented into mind-blowingly delicious dishes.

“Chefs do this all the time,” Blue Hill’s culinary director Adam Kaye says. “There are dishes on menus the world over that feature waste items. So, we wanted to draw attention to food waste and loss in the food system, in an extremely delicious way.”

Ahead, he shares six easy “trash” items that could easily be reinvented into dinner (or dessert). “You could probably use everything you buy from the produce section,” Kaye says. “It requires a little extra effort, but the payoff is always great.”