On an average household, a fridge is full of packed lunches, midnight snacks, ingredients, and even long-forgotten food. Imagine, all of these are stored in your fridge for a long time. That would be bad, right Food efficiency is necessary to help the environment and your health. Leftovers are amazing once you are able to maximise its potential.
It’s a common scenario for everyone to make food leftover mistakes. But if you do, make sure to end the cycle. There are many ways to avoid food leftover mistakes.
Soggy leftovers
If your pizza is soggy and gross every time you reheat in on the microwave, you’re doing it wrong. Reheating food also undergoes the right process. Take, for example, Bread. Bread requires a specific reheating process in order to make the outside crunchy and the inside soft. The same goes for that leftover pizza. Remember, how you cook your leftovers can make a huge difference to its quality.
The best way to reheat food is how the food was cooked in the first place. Pizza and bread are cooked in an oven, then you should reheat it in an oven to bring back its former glory. The same goes for other leftovers.
The “refrigerator velcro”
There’s a concept that chefs and cooks have been raving about and it’s called the “refrigerator velcro.” In case you haven’t heard, “refrigerator velcro” refers to foods that go well with almost everything you could think of, which are rice, pasta, and tortilla chips. Thinking about it, it does make sense, right?
Boring meals
Have you ever cooked food and forgot that you’ve placed leftovers in the fridge days ago? This may be because your food is boring. Cooking involves creativity. Looking at things differently, you can even consider that leftover fried vegetables into ingredients for your next meal.
There is no one ending when it comes to cooking. You can cook eggs in different ways and have different results. What difference should it have with your leftovers? Try different combinations and seasonings to spice up your meal.
Improper Storage
Leftovers are all food but they’re not the same. This means there are foods that go bad faster than others, and when you combine it all in one plastic container or Ziploc, the rotten foods will affect the fresh ones.
In storing food, you just don’t grab a generic plastic container or plastic bag to place your food, you need to separate the ingredients to keep it from affecting each other. Here’s an example. You ate salad last night but got full quickly; hence, the leftovers. So, you decided to store it all in a plastic container. After a few days, you were shocked to find the salad is no longer edible. The avocados will go bad before spinach, which will go bad before the shredded cheese. Store these ingredients separately, especially salad dressing, for you to be able to eat it to a later date longer.
Effects of Food Waste
We all know that food wastage is bad. The news, our parents, and even our teachers say a lot of people die from starvation, and that we are lucky to have enough food on our plates. Grownups always tell us not to waste food, which is true. There are a huge number of people going hungry and die of starvation. The United Nations even estimated that one in nine people have no access to healthy food. Other than that, there are more people who die from starvation. Yes, higher than the known killers combined — AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
But aside from the starvation issue in the world, food wastage also targets something precious to us humans and the world — mother nature. Food wastage greatly affects our environment.
Do you ever wonder where your food waste goes? It’s a common thought that food decomposes. However, when the food is in a landfill, it’s a different story. Landfills are only a place to store food wastes. So, when the food is stuck in the landfill, the lack of oxygen stimulates bacteria to produce methane gas, which is a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming we are experiencing now.
Food wastes are a serious matter, and we need to do something about it. Understand more about food efficiency, which is perfect for home cooking or starting your own culinary enterprise, through commercial cookery courses offered by MCIE. The school offers real-life training under industry experts that will help students prepare for their culinary journey.
For enquiries, contact MCIE today: Call: 1300 737 004 from Monday to Friday at 9:00 am to 5:00 pm or Email: email info@mcie.edu.au or visit the Contact Us Page: https://www.mcie.edu.au/contact/
