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Suffolk student chefs turn ‘waste’ food into fine dining menu

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Chef students at Suffolk New College will be serving up a meal with a difference this week: a six-course meal using ingredients that would otherwise have been thrown away.

The level three professional cookery and patisserie students are working alongside a Michelin-trained chef with a passion for reducing food waste. Rowen Halstead from Gazeley, Bury St Edmunds, worked in top restaurants both in London and East

Anglia before deciding to use his talents to teach others how to turn discarded food into mouth-watering meals.

Rowan Halstead in the suffolk new college kitchens

The dishes at Wednesday evening’s event held in the college’s Chef’s Whites restaurant will include caramelised onion focaccia with onion skin salt, potato skin hash browns, fermented leek tops with vegetable trim treacle, left-over bread ravioli and a mousse made with spent coffee.

Chef lecturer Dale Knights invited Rowen to lead one of the restaurant’s regular themed evenings with a menu designed to pair creativity with sustainability.

Dale Knights and learner

“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,” he said.

Among the student chefs cooking Rowen’s menu will be Harnesh Rajasinghan, 19, a level three professional cookery student from Kesgrave. “Food waste is a big thing in cooking,” he says. “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.”

Rowen has worked alongside Suffolk New College to offer food demonstrations in the past year but this is the first time he has been a guest chef at its restaurant, where meals are cooked by the students on three lunchtimes and two evenings each week.

Rowan Halstead

With restaurants closing down at the highest rate for more than a decade, he says, it’s vital the next generation of chefs should understand how food businesses can be made stronger by reducing waste.

“On average, 50 per cent of the food that enters a restaurant’s doors will end up in the bin,” he says. “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. This menu is designed to be entirely zero-waste – I hope understanding how to use waste creatively will help their careers as well as bringing a brighter future for our food.”

The Evening with Rowen Halstead at the Chef’s Whites restaurant at Suffolk New College, Rope Walk, Ipswich, will take place on Wednesday, January 22nd. Bookings can be made here: https://www.suffolk.ac.uk/college-life/public-facilities/chefs-whites-restaurant/

Posted 20 January 2025