NO-WASTE CHEF
SARAH’S MADE THE KITCHEN HER HAPPY PLACE, USING FOOD THAT NORMALLY GOES TO WASTE
‘My scraps taste the best!’
When Sarah Burtscher used to live on a remote high country station in Tekapo, with a four-hour round trip to a large supermarket, she got used to making do with what she had, when need be.
Enjoying cooking for her family, the mum-of-three learnt ingenious ways to avoid food wastage and began to term certain dishes as “fridge cleaner” recipes – turning older, forgotten ingredients lurking at the back of the fridge or pantry into tasty meals and snacks.
“With remote living, you are totally responsible for all your own rubbish,” Sarah tells the Weekly from the family’s new base in Christchurch.
“With no easy wheelie bins to take it away, it makes you aware. I looked at what I was doing in cleaning out the fridge and wondered what the stats were on wastage from the kitchen. The more I looked into it, the more I realised our food waste statistics are horrific.
“Kiwis throw away 157,389 tonnes of food a year and a lot of people just don’t know how to utilise their grocery shop to the full.”
During 2020’s level 4 lockdown, when home cooking became a necessity, Sarah began experimenting with things like brown rice to make cookies – “We ran out of flour like everybody else!” – her youngest son, enamoured with his mum’s culinary delights, encouraged her to put the recipes into a cookbook.
So Sarah did just that, and her book Waste Not Want Not, released this month, is based on the top 10 foods thrown out in Aotearoa – bread, oranges, mandarins, apples, bananas, potatoes, poultry, rice, lettuce and beef.
“You don’t need to be a good cook with fancy ingredients, you can just make do and cook on,” tells the 49-year-old, who admits to often taking a sticky beak in friends’ pantries – for research purposes only, of course!
“I’ve added a lockdown chapter of recipes, all thought up and tested in isolation when there was a lot of cooking going on to feed everyone in my bubble, including my mum, who was with us, and my husband Michael, who was an essential worker as a farmer.
“Our garden yielded potatoes quite late in the season, so I found myself with a bucket of spuds going, ‘What can I do with all these? Okay, let’s make a gratin and forgotten vegetable soup for dinner.’”
Sarah believes it’s never been more important to value your food, to help the environment and to help your wallet.
“Some people don’t realise there’s so much you can stick in the freezer too, such as rice after it’s been cooked or a bag of nuts, which, if opened and tied with a rubber band, can often go rancid in the pantry after a month.”
Born and bred on a farm in the Hawke’s Bay, Sarah grew up with memories of bottling summer fruit with her mother, and says the kitchen has always been her happy place.
At 10, it was picked up that she had dyslexia, a learning disorder that makes it harder to read, write or do number work.
“I’ve got a reasonably outgoing personality, so I could laugh at my mistakes at school,” recalls Sarah. “But it’s been quite a challenge my whole life and it can put you off writing anything down.
“I think it’s partly why I’ve come up with my own recipes and cook instinctively because struggling with dyslexia means I find following recipes difficult.
“So I either have to have just the recipe, with no recipe method beside it, so that my eyes don’t get distracted, or read it a lot beforehand to try to memorise it. Testing recipes and writing them down was a bit of a learning curve for the book.”
Sarah has been involved in the hospitality business since her teens, when she started waitressing in the last two years of school to earn pocket money.
After living in London and Corfu on her OE, she returned to NZ in the early 2000s and bought her first “somewhat run-down” café in Christchurch, before going on to revamp several cafés around Lake Tekapo.
Overcoming her challenges has been very rewarding and she’s proud of the result. And although the mum of Louie, 16, Edie, 12, and Nick, 11, never trained professionally, she says it’s probably a good thing. “According to my family, I’m quite bossy in the kitchen!”