It’s Halloween and I am, quite fittingly, standing in front of a vat of slowly fermenting rabbit carcass. I have not wandered into some incredibly macabre house of horrors, nor have I somehow transplanted into a particularly gruesome scene from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I’m in the backroom of Hackney Wick’s Silo restaurant, and head chef and owner Douglas McMaster is showing me the array of garum he’s working on for the menu. Essentially an umami-rich liquid seasoning, garum was historically made with fish, salt and koji – a fermentation starter made from grains – but these days can be made with anything from leftover whey to animal meat – at Silo, McMaster uses both and more.
Hackney Wick’s Silo exterior
Inside this cupboard I’m looking at alone, there are garums made from bread, venison, cheese, beetroot and the aforementioned rabbit. Some age in large tubs, others in enormous 100kg drums. On the shelf outside, meanwhile, McMaster is fermenting a series of misos made from everything from bread to leftover beer grain from the brewing process at Crate downstairs. The benefits of these ingredients are twofold at Silo. With a strict zero-waste approach, the restaurant needs to find something to do with elements of ingredients that don’t make it onto the plate – misos and garums are simple ways to give these offcuts and byproducts new life – but a tasting of a few droplets of each garum shows me that the largest benefit of all is simple: big, bold flavour.
Venison garum is meaty and rich and has a gamey lift. Bread garum has a mellow hit with a lingering sweetness and a yeasty aftertaste. Whey garum, meanwhile, has an almost tannic texture and a parmesan finish. They’re all intensely umami – like a cheat code for making something delicious.
McMaster has been making these for the restaurant since Silo opened, but is just about to open a fermentation factory down the canal, which will scale up this operation and make koji as well as a series of garums for, initially, other food businesses, but eventually to sell direct to consumer as well. Koji is the key to all of this. A large part of Japanese cooking, koji can refer to either soybeans or grains inoculated with aspergillus oryzae mould, or simply the mould itself, and is characterised by its flavour profile, which sees intense hits of umami tempered by a floral sweetness. It has been used for thousands of years to ferment ingredients to create sauces and pastes like soy sauce and miso or drinks like sake and sweet, cloudy amazake.
Shelves of koji
As we wander down the towpath towards the factory, I ask McMaster why he’s made the move towards food development. “It’s a simple answer – this is the most simple method of combating food waste, the most creative, and it’s the most flavour forward,” he tells me. “Anyone that’s interested in flavour, despite any interest in environmentalism, is going to be excited by this when they taste those flavours and products. Umami is incredible. It’s a real upgrade in our cooking to have umami. In British cuisine, we just don’t have it. We have Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce, and marmite. That’s about it.”
We arrive at the factory as the team is beginning to sort a series of grains. It’s a fairly simple setup – a large walk-in fridge, an open space which will soon be a ‘hot room’ for advanced ageing, and then what McMaster calls a ‘koji room’, essentially a spacious room with drying racks where the inoculated grains will be spread across enormous beds in a temperature-controlled, high-humidity space to develop koji. He tells me that once it’s all up and running the space will produce more than a tonne of koji each week. At the moment, interest has largely been from food production companies, although it’s expected that chefs will come sniffing around once they catch wind of the impressive work the team are doing and the immense sustainability ethics of it all.
“Sustainability is the creative catalyst that makes us do things to close loops, to discover new flavours and try to create this circular, almost poetic food system,” McMaster tells me when I ask about the role his zero-waste approach has played in this whole setup. “But the catalyst really is just not fucking the environment.” Before the fermentation project was properly set up with head of fermentation Ryan Walker, Silo was composting around 10-15% of its food; that number has now dropped to 1%.
Bread baking at Silo
Garum fermenting at Silo
It’s easy to see why it’s all necessary, too. McMaster describes running a zero-waste restaurant as being a “fish trying to swim up a tall stream with rocks constantly trying to bash us back.” While we’re talking at the restaurant, a man arrives with a seafood delivery. McMaster catches the box he’s brought in and follows him into the fridge. It turns out the fish has been delivered in a disposable box, despite McMaster making it clear to the supplier that they can’t accept single-use packaging. “We can’t accept that, mate,” he tells him. “Can you take it back with you?” As we move out of the kitchen, he texts the supplier, making it clear they need it to be delivered either empty of packaging or in reusable boxes that can be sent back with the driver. “It’s never-ending,” he tells me.
The work he does at Silo is an exceptionally impressive feat, but McMaster acknowledges that “while it’s great having this little microcosm that is Silo, doing its own fun things, that’s not making any impact. The ideology is, but the actual physical, quantifiable metric is just so insignificant.” For him, the fermentation is part of an approach on a more macro scale. “It’s about working with a much wider community to transform the food waste they have as part of an industrial system. Like the fish – there’s nothing wrong with the fish. They’re not genetically modified or grown in monocultures; they’re just fish. But there’s an enormous amount of waste, and suddenly, we’ll have the power to blend that in with the fish guts and fish heads and be able to make fish sauce with it in as little as two months.” It takes this zero-waste ethos of Silo and expands it beyond the four walls of the restaurant, allowing its impact to seep into the broken systems within which it has to function in the hopes of helping them work better, too.
It’s about working with a much wider community to transform the food waste they have as part of an industrial system
McMaster isn’t the only one turning his head to food development either. In Copenhagen – which he cites as one of the homes of food ingenuity – a number of fine-dining chefs are stepping beyond the kitchen in an effort to use their creativity to influence food systems, too. Noma Restaurant, a household name and five-time winner of the best restaurant in the world at World’s 50 Best Restaurants, launched Noma Projects in 2022. Consistently cited as one of the most innovative restaurants of our time, Noma fundamentally changed the way we eat around the world. Noma Projects attempts to take that ingenuity a step further, bringing it to people’s pantries and allowing them to operate their low-waste framework on a larger scale around the world.
Inside Noma's factory
Equipment at Noma's fermentation factory
“The products we release through Noma Projects are often a result of upcycling or reducing waste within our own operations,” Lena Hennessy, CEO of Noma Projects, tells me. “The restaurant, test kitchen, fermentation lab, and production space work in their own micro-ecosystem to make use of any waste or byproducts, transforming them into new flavours and finding new ways to use them. For example, any waste from a specific ingredient that Noma uses in a menu goes back to the fermentation lab to be transformed and preserved in new ways, then returned to the test kitchen or considered for production use by Noma Projects.”
Current products sold through Noma Projects include an aged pumpkin vinegar made with the juice of excess pumpkins, the much-loved corn yuzu hot sauce, a classic mushroom garum and a rhubarb tamari, which has a similar flavour profile to pomegranate molasses. “When releasing new products, we look at the different condiments, cooking sauces, vinegars, oils, misos and garums in use at Noma, and we consider which ones would work well for home cooking and are possible to produce in larger volumes,” Hennessy tells me. “Each product comes from our fermentation lab or test kitchen, and has been developed as part of creating new menus or exploring other ways to use ingredients or find new flavours. Some of our products are iconic Noma flavours used in our kitchen for over a decade, while others are newer inventions from more recent menus or from our travels.”
Noma's Corn Yuzu Hot Sauce
This process of food investigation, development and fermentation with a view to reducing waste doesn’t always centre on garums, misos and other sauces, though. In 2013, just down the road from Noma, a former chef at the restaurant opened up his own restaurant, Amass, which became a leader in sustainable dining and very sadly closed its doors in 2022. From that closure, though, came a new venture for owner Matt Orlando: Endless Food Co, in collaboration with former Amass staff members Maximillian Bogenmann and Christian Bach. Amass had a robust test kitchen centred around reducing food waste, and the ideas that were seeded there around moving towards a sustainable food system that prioritises flavour have translated over into the research they’re doing now.
Endless Food Co is currently working on one project only: chocolate. Or, more specifically, not chocolate. THIC (This Isn’t Chocolate) is a chocolate alternative made from upcycled brewers’ spent grain – a byproduct of beer making that accounts for around 85% of all brewing waste. Developed over years of research to mimic both the flavour and texture of chocolate made with cacao – the farming of which is extremely environmentally disruptive – the product officially launched in July 2023 for businesses to use and is already on the menu at some of Copenhagen’s leading eateries, including in pain au chocolat at Kaf, in ice cream at Abrikos, chocolate chip cookies at Diamond Slice and in hot chocolate at La Banchina.
Endless Food Co's "This Isn't Chocolate"
“Chocolate has enough problems to choose from,” co-founder Christian Bach tells me when I ask why they started with chocolate. “Intense carbon footprint? Check. Price volatility? Check. Potential future scarcity? Check. Problematic labour practices? Check. And while we certainly can’t solve all of the above, it does create an opportunity to provide a solution to real problems on many levels.” Additionally, he tells me that chocolate’s widespread popularity is an asset to them – it increases the chances of impacting more people in Copenhagen and beyond and getting the product out there quicker, allowing them to do more work tackling food waste.
Chocolate has enough problems to choose from
Also in the Copenhagen suburb of Refshaleøen, which is home to both Noma and the former Amass site, sits Alchemist restaurant. Unlike any other culinary experience you’ll ever have, Alchemist is a whirlwind of futuristic dining across 50 courses, or ‘impressions’ as head chef and owner Rasmus Munk calls them. Part of the meal takes place in a dome-like dining room where an array of imagery is projected onto the roof, increasing in both pace and intensity as the evening progresses. One dish arrives at the table resembling a supersized human eye. Another requires you to lick toppings off a hauntingly realistic tongue. It’s exactly the kind of fodder that is catnip for fine-dining sceptics spurred on by movies like The Menu, and yet Alchemist is that rare thing that allows it to get away with pushing the boundaries: delicious. A constant on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list (currently sitting at number eight) and possessing two Michelin stars, the restaurant might push your culinary and visual boundaries, but it will feed you extremely well as it does.
Munk and the Alchemist team, much like Amass, Noma and Silo, had been undertaking food research in the restaurant’s test kitchen for years. Recently, he’s expanded that concept and set up Spora, a food research centre that aims to challenge our broken food systems. “Our vision at Alchemist has been to change the world through gastronomy, and that serves as a guideline for everything we do,” Munk tells me. “I felt that some of the research and creativity that goes into creating dishes for 52 guests a night could have the potential to help create both delicious and sustainable food solutions that can be scaled up for the global food system.”
Food needs to be both sustainable, healthy, and delicious
While Spora is yet to release a product at a consumer level, the lab has collaborated on a range of efforts, including their own approach to chocolate made with spent brewers grain, alongside cell-grown salmon. Much like McMaster and the Noma and Endless Food Co teams, the priority is making things taste good in order to appeal to the masses. “Our perspective is that most of us will only eat something again and again if it fits into our food culture and if it is delicious,” Mette Johnson, CEO of Spora tells me. “Gastronomy does deliciousness like no other and can contribute to making the foods that we need.”
Munk seconds this, saying “Food needs to be both sustainable, healthy, and delicious. Today we are not there. We are missing the delicious, flavourful part. Repurchase rates show us that consumers are not fully adapting to new foods. To make a difference, we need to create foods that consumers buy again and again.”
Inside Spora's research lab
In the UK alone, we waste over 10.7 million tonnes of food a year. It is one of the biggest issues in our food system, and feeds into a cycle of selective eating where we drain the earth of its resources and only consume the parts we see as desirable, discarding the rest. It’s clear that chefs, particularly fine dining chefs – people who work intimately with food, day in and day out – see this as a problem that needs to be solved. “Development at fine dining restaurants has the advantage of being creative, competitive, very fast-paced, and empirical,” says Munk when I ask about the connection between fine dining and food research. “Somehow, the impatient minds of chefs and the methodical, slow and deep-diving scientific method is a very potent combination.”
Science absolutely does, and will, play a big part in the future of repurposing food waste. But sometimes, it really is as simple as what McMaster is doing at Silo, based on historical techniques – fermenting and distilling ingredients to give them new life. Two decades ago, produce-driven tasting menus and molecular dining were the hottest tickets in gastronomy, but it seems that now the most interesting place in the food world might be the laboratory.
