With the Christmas holidays around the corner, consumption increases and, at the same time, also the food waste. Christmas Eve dinner, Christmas lunch and Boxing Day, not to mention New Year's Eve. The Christmas holidays lead to enormous food waste (last Christmas they ended up in the bins over 500 thousand tons of food, more than 80 euros per family) and, as a consequence, to a surge in the level of pollution (according to experts, each ton produces 4,2 tons of carbon dioxide).
The Danish application Too Good To Go was born with the aim of raising awareness among citizens against waste at home, especially in this Christmas 2020 characterized by restrictions and the need to take refuge in consolatory food.
In times of Covid, Too Good To Go is launching the "Make Christmas last longer" initiative, an invitation to limit food waste as much as possible with some tips for sharing, freezing, preserving or reusing it for creative recipes.
The undisputed protagonist is the chocolate, the consolation food par excellence, the purchase of which has undergone enormous growth since the last lockdown, destined to grow again during these Christmas holidays.
For the occasion, the app asked the opinion of an expert on the subject, the pastry chef and Maître Chocolatier Ernst Knam which has collected 5 useful anti-waste tips to save chocolate from the trash:
- Sweets… on the front line! It's about collecting all the boxes of chocolates and various sweets and merging them in one place, so as to be clearly visible.
- Password: planning. Consume the products according to the expiration date.
- Homemade hot chocolate. On colder days you can use leftover chocolate for a cup of hot chocolate.
- Saving the chocolate with the Magic Boxes. For those with a sweet tooth, unsold sweets can be purchased from pastry shops or grocery stores using the Too Good To Go app and picked up at the relevant point of sale.
- Experiment with anti-waste recipes. Mousses, brownies, cakes or toppings. There are tons of tasty recipes to use up leftover chocolate.
And here is an easy-to-make recipe to make at home with leftovers of chocolate and nougat from the holidays to be reused for a delicious dessert
Dark chocolate and nougat mousse (for 6 people)
Ingredients for the Marquise
- 100 gr yolks
- 300 gr powdered sugar
- 225 g egg whites
- 90 gr cocoa
- 30 gr potato flour
- Sugar to taste
Ingredients for the Mousse
- 200 g dark chocolate (55%)
- 400 g semi-whipped fresh cream
- 300 g of chopped nougat
Ingredients for decoration
- Cocoa powder
- Dark chocolate grains
- 50 g of chopped nougat
Method
Beat the yolks with 100 grams of icing sugar. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites together with the remaining icing sugar. Then combine the two compounds, sift the starch and cocoa and finally add them to the compound, mixing gently with movements from bottom to top so as not to disassemble the whites. At this point, pour the marquise onto a baking sheet lined with baking paper with a thickness of about 5 mm. Bake for about 10-12 minutes and then remove the marquise from the oven and dust it with caster sugar before it cools.
Meanwhile, melt the dark chocolate in a bain-marie (it is essential that the temperature is between 45-50°C). Pour the semi-whipped cream into the chocolate and mix gently with a whisk until the ingredients are perfectly blended. Take a ring with a diameter of 22-24 cm and line it with a marquise disc. Then, fill the mold with the mousse and level the surface with a spatula, add the pieces of nougat. Leave to rest in the fridge for 2 hours. Once the necessary time has elapsed, remove the ring and dust the surface with bitter cocoa, cover the edges with the grains and decorate with the leftover pieces of nougat.
WATCH THE VIDEO WITH THE PANETTONE MOUSSE RECIPE E
ANTI-WASTE NOUGAT BY CHEF ERNST KNAM:
