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Saving food from being wasted can range from just composting food scraps to cooking with the whole ingredient, which means the leaves, stems, skin and everything in between. It’s often argued that it’s not really worth saving food from the waste bin if energy or other ingredients are required, but I believe that all food is worth saving.
We obviously need to cook and eat food every day, so why not reinvent dishes to include these otherwise unwanted ingredients? Zero waste at its simplest can also mean basic, innovative recipes and solutions for byproducts, such as today’s mango pit and skin coulis. Such recipes are an easier sell, because they simplify the concept and create a valuable product out of very little.
Mango pit and skin coulis
Coulis is a thin, smooth sauce that’s usually made from sieved fruit, and this one takes the flavour and residual flesh left on mango pits and skins and turns it into a restaurant-grade fruit sauce. When I first started cooking back in the late 1990s, chefs were putting a coulis of some kind on most puddings, and some still do but, to be fair, coulis is delicious and adds another dimension to a dish. Sweet, sour and flavoursome, with a smooth and silky texture, coulis is a simple and fun way to upcycle mango scraps, and shows how it’s well worth extracting the flavour from remnants and offcuts.
It also exemplifies the principles I apply when developing food products and menu items for food businesses and restaurants: that is, minimising waste through creative repurposing, maximising flavour extraction from overlooked ingredients, and creating versatile new ingredients that can be incorporated into recipes or even developed into standalone products. What works in professional kitchens and product development often translates beautifully to home cooking – and vice versa – transforming forgotten and often discarded ingredients into something of genuine culinary value.
I first had the idea for this coulis while developing a recipe for mango pit vodka, and it can be drizzled, stirred or shaken into countless drinks and desserts. It’s gorgeous diluted with sparkling water, in a smoothie or iced tea, shaken into a mango mojito or spooned over pancakes, porridge or, my personal favourite, yoghurt. The scraps from one mango typically yield about 100g of coulis, and the recipe below can be scaled up for as many mango pits and skins as you have to hand.
Pit and skin of 1 ripe mango
50g sugar, honey or jaggery
Finely grated zest and juice of ¼ lemon or lime (optional)
Put the mango pit and skin in a small saucepan and add water just to cover. Add the sugar or honey (or jaggery, for an extra-flavoursome Indian twist) and the optional lemon or lime juice and zest. Bring to a boil, stirring gently, then turn down to a simmer and cook for 15–20 minutes, until the syrup is slightly thickened and the whole kitchen smells of mangoes.
Leave to cool to room temperature, then strain through a fine sieve, rubbing any flesh off the pit and skin and pressing it through the sieve to extract every last bit – the remaining pit and skin can now be composted. Return the resulting coulis to the pan, bring back to a boil and reduce until it coats the back of a spoon or reaches your desired thickness. Store in a clean jar in the fridge for about five days, or portion and freeze.
