These College Students’ Carrot Pulp Recipes Are Novel Ways To Repurpose Food Waste
If you own a juicer at home, you know the struggle of having way too much leftover pulp, and oftentimes, you probably just end up tossing the leftover pulp to enjoy your drink.
Juice pulp can be actually be reconverted into incredible recipes.
Many amazing dishes utilizing pulps and other food waste were created at the ReThink Waste competition, organized and run by students from Cal Poly Pomona over the weekend. In a Chopped-style competition, students from the university’s food science, culinology, and culinary arts/hospitality programs teamed up to create dishes utilizing various food waste ingredients — one of which was carrot pulp.
The pulp, supplied by revolutionary granola startup Pulp Pantry, comes from juiceries that usually end up discarding it after juicing carrots. That pulp can be up to 75% of the actual carrot, and is a great source of nutrients like fiber. By utilizing that pulp, nutrition and flavor can easily be brought back into many existing dishes.
The student teams easily highlighted that in a round of entree dishes that used carrot pulp along with coffee chaff — the dried skins leftover from roasting coffee beans. I was lucky enough to be a judge at this competition, along with Pulp Pantry’s CEO Kaitlin Mogentale, Chef Travis Flood from Pappas Artisanal, and Mike Hyde, a director of Food Service for Granada Hill charter schools.
Here are each of the four dishes that the teams came up with – and my thoughts and commentary on each and how they would stack up in a restaurant setting.
Team 1 – Carrot and Coffee Risotto
Using carrot pulp as an ingredient in the risotto, and the coffee chaff to infuse the broth that cooked the rice, the first team impressed with the flavor combinations of carrot, coffee, parsley, and lemon that pervaded the whole dish. While you could definitely tell that the dish contained carrot pulp, and wasn’t hiding the fact that it contained food waste, it was an incredibly delicious risotto. I almost ended up eating the whole plate before reminding myself I had a ton more food coming.
Team 2 – Carne Guisada con Zanahoria
This was a simplistic but well-executed spin on traditional Colombian steak with a carrot relish. The coffee chaff-marinated ribeye steak was nicely cooked to a medium-well, and the carrot relish was zesty, bright, and went brilliantly with the meaty ribeye. While the dish used carrot pulp, it could’ve just as easily been regular carrots that were processed to make the relish, as I couldn’t tell that it was pulp from the visual appearance or the taste. Definitely an impressive job.
Team 3 – Carrot Ravioli with Mushroom Stroganoff
This dish was so perfectly disguised that I had no idea that it was made of carrot pulp until the team that presented it told me it was. They converted the pulp into a gorgeous pasta dough, and filled it with cheeses and more of the carrot pulp. The coffee chaff was used to make a creamy mushroom stroganoff sauce that coated the pasta perfectly. It was definitely a dish I could see being in a restaurant, and was arguably the most impressive dish of the entire competition.
Team 4 – Burger Sliders with Garlic-Parmesan Zucchini Fries
This was an incredibly tasty and delicious slider. The patty was made with ground beef and carrot pulp to enrich the beef. Coffee chaff was used to make the barbeque sauce that topped the sliders, and more carrot pulp was utilized in the coating of the zucchini fries. Simple, but done extremely well.
Overall, my personal favorite was the carrot ravioli, which just impressed in terms of flavor, presentation, and creativity with the pulp and coffee chaff. While Team 2 ultimately won the competition, every single team did an amazing job.
Hopefully, seeing these recipes inspires you to make something using your carrot juice pulps at home. Honestly, it doesn’t have to be just carrot pulp, either. These recipes — and the ReThink Waste competition — are just the latest amazing repurposed food products to come out of the food waste fad sweeping across the industry.
Anything that you could consider food waste can be reconverted into other tasty food items. It’s one of the food industry’s biggest growing fads, with foods like Pulp Pantry’s granola and Regrained’s spent beer grain granola bars leading the charge.
Food waste is a great source of nutrients and fiber, and honestly shouldn’t be going to waste. The more you can use at home, the more our world can solve its major global food waste issue.
