Latest news with #DougMcMaster
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'The laziest ingredient of all': Renowned chef thinks luxury item should be wiped off menus
Every week, we interview top chefs from around the UK, hearing about their cheap food hacks, views on the industry and more. This week, we speak to Doug McMaster, owner of the world's first zero waste restaurant Silo and former winner of Britain's best young chef award... I wasn't the best young chef in the UK... There are young chefs at Silo who are far superior in the kitchen than I was at any stage of my culinary career. Maybe I was the most daring, or the most creative chef back then at the time, but I was by no means the most talented chef. Soon we're going to be producing "zero-soy sauce"... made from 50% bread waste (given to us as bread discard from local bakeries) and 50% lupin, which is a regenerative grain. Using that to make our zero-soy sauce means we'll be able to harness this astonishing British product that will save us from importing tens of thousands of litres of soy sauce from China. We'll be saving on a huge carbon footprint, so the more we can make ourselves, the better. Read all the latest money news The best city in the world to eat is... Copenhagen. For me, "the Noma effect" has had this seismic ripple creating a wave of excellence in so many parts of the hospitality sector, from bakeries and coffee shops, to breweries and avant-garde restaurants. Excluding Tokyo, as its excellence is untouchable, also excluding London... New York deserves a mention, but since COVID, it seems to have lost its sparkle. When attending a dinner party, you should bring something you've made yourself... Anyone can buy a £15 bottle of wine from a local deli and bring it along to dinner, but it's so much more special when someone can make something and offer that as a gift instead. We're living in an AI-generated robot world; there just aren't enough things that are actually handmade by people any more. From a zero-material-waste point of view, ordering tap water is great as it avoids single-use glass, but... the quality of London tap water is abominable. If you care about the quality of your ingredients, why would you not do the same with water? One thing I'd never want to see in a restaurant again is... caviar. It's the least creative of all the ingredients. Arguably, it's the laziest ingredient of all. I would be infinitely more impressed by a chef who can turn a humble carrot into something extraordinary, than one who can put caviar on top of a dish. That's the kind of creativity and artistic flair that deserves credit, not the ability to put caviar on something. It has this weird currency in hospitality where it has some kind of authority in restaurant spaces where it shouldn't. More Cheap Eats: Stop creating generic restaurant roundups, like the "best restaurant in London"... "The best" is an infinitely subjective measuring stick that makes no sense in such a colourful, diverse and heterogeneous restaurant industry. It's a reductive and diminishing way of looking at our industry. When you go to a new city, it might be a useful tool to help you narrow down a search, but overall it's not a helpful way of grading things. There are lots of interesting lists that could be written that would be genuinely useful and valuable, but they should be more specific, diverse and not just full of sensationalised jargon. You could, for example, have an interesting list of the restaurants where you can eat koji fermented foods, or a list of bars working with low-packaging suppliers. We should celebrate nuance and ingenuity in this world, rather than trying to categorise everything under one broad and unspecific umbrella. Restaurateurs should stop buying from soulless supply chains... By that, I mean a supply chain where there is no connection to the people and planet that produce our food. Using those supply chains does a disservice to all the food systems and farmers who are working overtime to save the planet, and they encourage the sort of industrial agriculture that we're trying to combat. Any supply chain that is disassociated from nature is one that we should avoid. You asked who I think is the best chef in the UK is... but it's a question that's drenched in absurdity. What's best in one person's eyes is personal, subjective. Let's not homogenise our industry with one opinion or one way of doing things. When we do, we unconsciously all start cooking the same, and that's boring. We should be celebrating what makes us different, not valorising someone as "the best". I could be persuaded to name someone who cooks the best seafood in Brighton, or someone making the best pasta in Hackney Wick…but to name "the best chef in the UK" is too reductive.
Sky News
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sky News
'The laziest ingredient of all': Renowned chef thinks luxury item should be wiped off menus
Every week, we interview top chefs from around the UK, hearing about their cheap food hacks, views on the industry and more. This week, we speak to Doug McMaster, owner of the world's first zero waste restaurant Silo and former winner of Britain's best young chef award... I wasn't the best young chef in the UK... There are young chefs at Silo who are far superior in the kitchen than I was at any stage of my culinary career. Maybe I was the most daring, or the most creative chef back then at the time, but I was by no means the most talented chef. Soon we're going to be producing "zero-soy sauce"... made from 50% bread waste (given to us as bread discard from local bakeries) and 50% lupin, which is a regenerative grain. Using that to make our zero-soy sauce means we'll be able to harness this astonishing British product that will save us from importing tens of thousands of litres of soy sauce from China. We'll be saving on a huge carbon footprint, so the more we can make ourselves, the better. The best city in the world to eat is... Copenhagen. For me, "the Noma effect" has had this seismic ripple creating a wave of excellence in so many parts of the hospitality sector, from bakeries and coffee shops, to breweries and avant-garde restaurants. Excluding Tokyo, as its excellence is untouchable, also excluding London... New York deserves a mention, but since COVID, it seems to have lost its sparkle. When attending a dinner party, you should bring something you've made yourself... Anyone can buy a £15 bottle of wine from a local deli and bring it along to dinner, but it's so much more special when someone can make something and offer that as a gift instead. We're living in an AI-generated robot world; there just aren't enough things that are actually handmade by people any more. From a zero-material-waste point of view, ordering tap water is great as it avoids single-use glass, but... the quality of London tap water is abominable. If you care about the quality of your ingredients, why would you not do the same with water? One thing I'd never want to see in a restaurant again is... caviar. It's the least creative of all the ingredients. Arguably, it's the laziest ingredient of all. I would be infinitely more impressed by a chef who can turn a humble carrot into something extraordinary, than one who can put caviar on top of a dish. That's the kind of creativity and artistic flair that deserves credit, not the ability to put caviar on something. It has this weird currency in hospitality where it has some kind of authority in restaurant spaces where it shouldn't. Stop creating generic restaurant roundups, like the "best restaurant in London"... "The best" is an infinitely subjective measuring stick that makes no sense in such a colourful, diverse and heterogeneous restaurant industry. It's a reductive and diminishing way of looking at our industry. When you go to a new city, it might be a useful tool to help you narrow down a search, but overall it's not a helpful way of grading things. There are lots of interesting lists that could be written that would be genuinely useful and valuable, but they should be more specific, diverse and not just full of sensationalised jargon. You could, for example, have an interesting list of the restaurants where you can eat koji fermented foods, or a list of bars working with low-packaging suppliers. We should celebrate nuance and ingenuity in this world, rather than trying to categorise everything under one broad and unspecific umbrella. Restaurateurs should stop buying from soulless supply chains... By that, I mean a supply chain where there is no connection to the people and planet that produce our food. Using those supply chains does a disservice to all the food systems and farmers who are working overtime to save the planet, and they encourage the sort of industrial agriculture that we're trying to combat. Any supply chain that is disassociated from nature is one that we should avoid. You asked who I think is the best chef in the UK is... but it's a question that's drenched in absurdity. What's best in one person's eyes is personal, subjective. Let's not homogenise our industry with one opinion or one way of doing things. When we do, we unconsciously all start cooking the same, and that's boring. We should be celebrating what makes us different, not valorising someone as "the best". I could be persuaded to name someone who cooks the best seafood in Brighton, or someone making the best pasta in Hackney Wick…but to name "the best chef in the UK" is too reductive.
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘It really is possible to be zero waste': the restaurant with no bin
Hunched over the pass in the open restaurant kitchen, a team of chefs are dusting ceviche with a powder made from lime skins that would, in most cases, have been thrown away. The Mexico City restaurant where they work looks like most restaurant kitchens but it lacks one key element: there is no bin. Baldío was co-founded by brothers Lucio and Pablo Usobiaga and chef Doug McMaster, best known for his groundbreaking zero-waste spot Silo London. 'In my eyes, bins are coffins for things that have been badly designed,' says McMaster. 'If there was a trophy for negligence, it would be bin-shaped.' The food, which recently earned a Michelin green star, is creative but still quintessentially Mexican: squash tostada with guaca-broccoli, maguey flower, maguey worm, chinampa flower, or grassfed pork from Veracruz with tamarind mole, served with chinampa greens and house-made kimchi. Significant planning is needed from sourcing to preparation, and the founders are also behind Arca Tierra, a regenerative agriculture project that includes a network of 50 farmers in central Mexico as well as the organisation's own farm in the pre-Aztec canal system at Xochimilco, an ancient neighbourhood in the south of Mexico City. 'Restaurants can have a big environmental impact but they also have a big reach,' says Lucio Usobiaga. 'We want Baldío to be a model that shows it's possible to be both zero waste and to rely on farmers rather than supermarkets.' Although the food is finished off in the restaurant's open kitchen, most preparation happens at La Baldega, a workshop where the team operates a fermentation programme that helps preserve ingredients as well as upcycle byproducts such as peel and gristle. This includes pre-Hispanic Mexican drinks such as tepache and pulque, as well as koji fermentation – popular in Japan and China for thousands of years – to transform fish guts into sauce. Globally, one-fifth of food is lost or wasted, according to the UN, equivalent to 1bn meals a day, at a time when one in every nine people is malnourished. When food decomposes in landfill it releases methane, which has 25-times higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide. Silo, when it opened in 2014, became the first restaurant in the world not to have a bin, raising the bar on what zero waste means. Less than 1% of food is composted and no single-use materials are used. A dedicated pottery transforms glass into porcelain that is used for tableware, light fixtures and tiles. Baldío is part of a new wave of restaurants that are moving beyond vague claims of sustainability to embrace a regenerative ethos. In Lisbon, SEM, from the Silo alumni Lara Santo and George McLeod, serves invasive freshwater fish such as the zander, which was introduced to Portugal in the 1980s for sport. Flores, a family-run restaurant in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, dries offal in koji before shaving it over meat dishes. Helsinki's Nolla (meaning 'zero' in Finnish) gives compost to its suppliers and guests – a doggy bag with a difference. Baldío goes one step further through its symbiotic relationship with Xochimilco, the last remnant of the network of blue-green waterways that dazzled Spanish invaders when they arrived 500 years ago. The Unesco heritage site is a key stopover for migratory birds and the only place where axolotls still live in the wild. Although the unique ecosystem is severely threatened by urban sprawl, many Indigenous residents still farm chinampas (a pre-Aztec technique consisting of islands formed from willow trees, lilies and mud), gliding through the blue-green canals on wobbly canoes laden with lettuce, radish and verdolagas (Mexican parsley). 'In agriculture, how you go about production really determines how much carbon you emit,' says Melanie Kolb, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. As well as buying from five local families, Arca Tierra farms 18 chinampas using a three-row agroforestry system. The farming team led by Sonia Tapia Garcés combines ancestral techniques such as chapines – rich sediment cut into squares used for germinating seeds – with compost from Baldío's kitchen and a hi-tech wood shedder that allows them to create mulch, which contributes to the soil's potential for carbon sequestration. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion The result is a crop that is irrigated with bio-filtered canal water and can be harvested 365 days a year without depleting the soil's nutrients. It is enough to supply 50% of Baldío's needs. The restaurant's chefs, who visit every Monday to plan that week's menus, have a continuing dialogue with the growers and often help with harvesting. Ingredients are carried by boat to downtown Xochimilco and driven 8km to La Baldega. Reducing distance travelled and the need for refrigeration on longer journeys results in a fraction of the carbon emissions associated with typical restaurant supply chains. For 74-year-old Noy Coquis Saldedo, who rents land to Arca Tierra, the project offers an opportunity to preserve his identity at a time when just 2.5% of the chinampas are still used for traditional agriculture. 'It's very sad that young people don't want to farm any more,' he says. 'But now we are delivering food to the great city like my ancestors did.' A pod of young pelicans surf a warm gust between the verdant banks, practising for the journey they will soon make to California. For Lucio Usobiaga, closing the loop between the chinampas and Baldío could be a blueprint for the future. 'Ultimately, I hope the project shows people that a more just and better food system is possible.' And the food? When the Guardian tasted it, it was delicious: flame-licked, spiked with salsas and texturally balanced, it is distinctly Mexican – yet also something entirely its own.
