Students to serve fine dining menu using waste food

Student chefs at Ipswich's Suffolk New College are turning waste food into a fine dining menu.

The level three professional cookery and patisserie students will serve a six-course meal using ingredients that would otherwise have been thrown away.

They are working alongside Rowen Halstead, a Michelin-trained chef from Gazeley, near Bury St Edmunds and Newmarket, who is passionate about reducing food waste.

Mr Halstead gained experience in top restaurants across London and East Anglia before choosing to teach others.

Rowen Halstead  (Image: Suffolk New College) The dishes at the college's Chef's Whites restaurant will include caramelised onion focaccia with onion skin salt and potato skin hash browns.

As well as fermented leek tops with vegetable trim treacle, leftover bread ravioli, and a mousse made with spent coffee.

Dale Knights, chef lecturer, said: "We’re very lucky to have some amazing guest chefs who give their time to support us.

"We talk a lot about sustainability with our students – we talk a lot about reducing food waste, so when Rowen came to us with this idea for a themed evening, we loved it."

Among the student chefs cooking Mr Halstead's menu is Harnesh Rajasinghan, 19, a level three professional cookery student from Kesgrave.

He said: "Food waste is a big thing in cooking.

"With Rowen, we’ve already been making preserves out of things we never thought we could use, and that’s been inspiring – I hope I can take that on when I leave here and share it in the kitchens where I work."

Mr Halstead added: "On average, 50% of the food that enters a restaurant's doors will end up in the bin.

"What I am teaching them will help them to enter the industry far more mindful of food waste and with the knowledge that so many chefs lack about how to use food creatively."