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Drawing from a popular NYC restaurant, the innovative technique transforms often-discarded external salad greens into an luxurious green “mayonnaise”. It’s an smart approach to minimize leftovers while making a condiment flavorful and versatile.

Why Use External Lettuce Leaves?

These outer leaves serve as nature’s protective packaging, guarding the tender inner leaves. While composting produce scraps is a fundamental sustainable practice, finding creative uses for them is even more impactful. Converting excess ingredients into fertile compost prevents dump accumulation, where it can emit greenhouse gases, a potent climate issue.

It’s quite radical when you consider over it: food rots and becomes the ideal soil to nourish more crops, thereby closing the cycle and respecting the process of growth.

However, given over 30% extra food getting made compared to needed, using valuable resources wisely is crucial. Reducing waste not only saves cash but also supports the more sustainable way of living.

The Green “Mayonnaise” Recipe

The adaptable recipe functions with whatever variety of salad greens and nuts. Through incorporating a whole egg, one avoid the need to repurpose the leftover egg white. This result is a smooth, rich sauce that works perfectly with greens, grilled vegetables, seared poultry, pasta, or grains.

Serves two

To Make the Green Emulsion (Yields about 200g)

• 100 grams butter
• 50g external salad greens from 2 little gems, washed and dried
• 20g peeled salted nuts – white nuts such as pine nuts help maintain a vivid color, though any seeds will do
• One small whole egg

To Make the Side

• 2 little gem heads, split longwise
• Extra-virgin oil, to taste
• Fresh lime juice or apple cider vinegar, as desired
• 1 generous bunch fresh greens (such as dill), sprigs picked intact, stems thinly minced

Steps

Begin by preparing the mayonnaise. Heat the fat in one medium saucepan, add the outer lettuce greens, cover and wilt for approximately 60 seconds, stirring once or twice, until they’ve wilted. Transfer the mixture into a jug of an immersion processor, add the nuts and whole egg, then process till smooth. If needed, incorporate extra nuts to get the thick consistency. Store in an sealed container in the fridge for as long as three days.

For prepare the dish, drizzle each lettuce half with oil and acid, then salt generously. Dress with one tight drizzle of the green emulsion, then top with the herbs. Arrange on 2 dishes and serve immediately.