9 cocktails to reduce food waste
Here are some of our favourite ways to use up everything from egg whites to oyster shells in nine delicious drinks.
Cocktails have a bit of a reputation for using weird ingredients. Infusions, smoke, herbs you’ve never heard of…that kind of thing. It’s what makes them fun but it’s also what makes them intimidating to make at home. However, you can absolutely make delicious cocktails with simple ingredients and, what’s more, with ingredients that you might otherwise throw away.
Egg whites
Egg whites are used in all sorts of cocktails to give them a foamy top, but they’re especially central to fizzes and sours. This sweet apple and honey sake sour is a delicious way to use up any egg whites leftover from making ice cream or custards.
Aquafaba
If you’re vegan, or can’t eat eggs, you don’t have to give up drinking foamy cocktails. Aquafaba – literally meaning ‘bean water’ – is the liquid in a can of chickpeas, and will foam up similarly to egg whites in meringues and cocktails. So next time you break open a tin of chickpeas, don’t throw away the liquid! It’s more valuable than you’d think.
Oyster shells
Okay – oyster shells aren’t waste in the typical sense. You can’t eat them. However, like aquafaba you can get more use out of them than you’d think! Here, Rich Woods turns oyster shells into a delicious oyster shell vermouth – perfect in his St Petersburg Martini.
Infused gins
Alcohol takes on subtle flavours really well – much better than water. If you have some seasonal fruit that’s on the turn, preserving it in alcohol is a really easy and fun alternative to making jam. It means you can have a G&T that tastes of summer strawberries or spring rhubarb, even after your bounty has finished.
Fruit peels and cores
Chantelle Nicholson is the queen of low-waste cooking. Her recipes always have sustainability top-of-mind, so it’s no surprise that these two cocktail recipes make the most of the often thrown away part of fruit: peels and cores. If you’re making an apple crumble, pear cake or any other fruity dessert, save the peels to make these refreshing but wintry drinks.
Rice
This unusual cocktail from Will Bowlby takes inspiration from coconut rice for the airy foam on top. It just needs a small spoonful of rice to work, so if you have a tiny bit left in the pot, instead of chucking it try this recipe instead!
Tepache
Tepache is a sweet, fermented Mexican drink made with pineapple skins and cores. It’s good by itself but it’s also a brilliant base for margaritas, like in the recipe below. Not sure what to do with the flesh? Why not try these brilliant breakfast waffles with caramelised pineapple.
Shrubs
Shrubs have had a very welcome resurgence over the past few years. They’re a slightly vinegary fruit-infused syrup, and are a great way to use up easily-perishable ingredients like raspberries or strawberries. The fruits will be preserved in the syrup, and a relatively small amount gives a lot of flavour.
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