It doesn’t take long for those who get involved in the homestead movement to become interested in the lost kitchen skills of our grandparents and great-grandparents. Cooking from scratch is where most of us start, even if we start by cooking only one or two meals a week from scratch. As we master more cooking techniques, experience a few successes, and start reading more of the labels on “healthy foods” we buy at the grocery store, we are ready to experiment and expand our kitchen knowledge.
It sure didn’t take too long for me to move from cooking meals from scratch to making ingredients from scratch. Things like vegetable and bone broth, baking extracts, flavored sugars, yogurt, butter, and lard can be made from home. They taste better and are free from the chemicals and unnecessary ingredients found in the store-bought version. Remember, the closer you can stay to the natural state of real, whole food, the better. Not only better for your physical and financial health, but for the environment as a whole. The more you can DIY from leftover products or scraps, the less food has to travel, the less packaging has to be used, and the more self-sufficient you will become. Zero-waste cooking costs less and makes more. It helps you become a more creative cook and it fights food insecurity at the basic level.
If your family eats meat, it makes good sense to learn how to render your own lard and make your own bone broth. Lard has gone out of fashion, but it is a completely natural food, unlike cottonseed and canola oil. Lard has a very high smoke point which makes it perfect for frying and a high melting point which makes it ideal for making flaky crusts and pastries. It is also very simple to make and, if you use pasture-raised animals, much healthier than the lard you buy at the grocery store.
You can make lard with any animal fat. Simply trim the fat from the meat as cleanly as possible. Store in a large freezer bag until you have filled the bag. When you are ready to render the lard, remove from the freezer and dice as small as possible.
If you overcooked the lard or burnt it around the edges, it will still be fine to use for frying. It will have a stronger flavor and will not be suitable for crusts and pastries.
Bone broth is equally easy to make. Save chicken bones in the freezer until you have a large bag of bones. When you are ready to make the broth, take the bones from the freezer and let thaw.
If you do not eat meat, you can make a vegetable broth by saving vegetable scraps in the freezer and processing the same way.
Dairy products are another group of mysterious products that seem impossible to make at home. Items such as butter and yogurt are becoming increasingly expensive, so I was happy to discover how easy they are to make at home. If you have your own cows or dairy goats, you can make these products for next to nothing.
There are several different types of butter, all easy to make at home. Sweet butter, clarified butter, and cultured butter. Cultured butter is made from cultured cream, or cream that contains live bacterial cultures. Live cultures are good for your gut health and cultured butter is much more flavorful than sweet butter.
Homemade yogurt is even easier to make than butter.
Lard, bone broth, butter, and yogurt are fun cooking projects but there are a lot of ways to reduce kitchen waste that don’t take any time at all. We all have food scraps, and the more you cook from scratch, the more scraps you collect. They don’t all have to hit the compost pile. When you are saving food scraps, the best practice is to keep them in the freezer until you have enough to use.
Vegetable scraps can include peelings and the ugly tops and bottoms that usually get tossed out. Broccoli “trunks” can be saved and used to make cream of broccoli soup or broccoli rice casserole. Wilting carrots and zucchini are perfect to grate up and add to pancakes and quick breads. An assortment of vegetable scraps can be added to winter soups or used to make a vegetarian stock. Potato skins lose something in the freezer, but they are delicious fried in a little oil. Top your mashed potatoes with those crispy treats.
Fruit scraps can make a delicious fruit vinegar that is really tasty on fruit salads or pilafs. Simply fill a jar with fruit scraps, add one tablespoon sugar, and cover with water. Cap tightly and shake daily. It will go from a fruity water to a slightly alcoholic drink to a fruit vinegar.
Citrus peels can be candied, made into marmalade, dried and turned into zest, or added to a container of granulated sugar. The lightly citrus sugar is terrific in hot teas or used in sugar cookies. Spent vanilla beans can be placed in a canister of sugar as well, or use them to make your own vanilla extract.
Old bread can be turned into croutons or breadcrumbs. Past-its-prime bread is also perfect for bread puddings or French toast.
The more time you spend learning these lost kitchen skills and cooking from scratch, the more ways you will find to use everything you have, and the closer you will be in your quest for self-sufficiency.
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Thank you Jenny Flores for this informative and interesting article, very timely too as many people are home more and cooking from scratch.
Save all table scraps, leftover veggies, gravy, rice, meat etc... Whatever we didn't eat it then goes in a soup freezer bowl. When it is full it is time to make soup. We call it dump soup! If there is not enough of something I just open a home canned jar of it and dump it in. After a few hours of simmer it makes the best soup. Then all the little portions of food is not wasted.
Vegetable broth - Rather than using whole vegetables, save the scraps when you are cutting up vegetables. Items like garlic peels and cores, onion skins, carrot peels, the shells of peas, etc. can be saved into a gallon bag or a quart container and kept into the freezer until you want to make broth. You know - stuff that would otherwise be compost or scraps for chickens. You then boil the scraps as usual, strain, and then I like to reduce the broth if I'm not using it right away. The concentrated broth can be frozen in an ice cube tray or container for later use. I have learned not to use kale. Somehow kale goes bitter. But most scraps work well.
Suet cake for birds - Some fats I save in the usual, traditional ways - for instance, saving bacon fat to use later for cornbread, frying an egg, or pancakes, rendered beef trimmings for some baked goods, and pork fat. But I did not find a good use for the juices I drained off of ground beef, until one day I thought to make a suet-like cake for the woodpeckers and nuthatches in my area. I saved a store-bought suet container (you could use something else), tossed in some seeds, and then when I make something with ground beef or other meats, I just pour it over the seeds and refrigerate. You don't need to render it, as you only put it out in cold weather. After 3-4 times I have a suet cake. I don't buy them in the store anymore... a lot of those have unnatural ingredients anyway. The birds like it. You can throw in some other scraps too if you feel like it, like a little dried apple or orange peel or a few raisins.