These Fruits and Vegetables Cost More Than You Think

While in culinary school, our class was asked to do something I think most of us had hoped to avoid as aspiring chefs: math. What we were calculating was the actual cost of ingredients, mainly produce, based on how much of a given item is usable. Consider unavoidable food waste such as banana peels, the cores of bell peppers, the ends of celery, and so on. When you're paying for an item by weight, in culinary math terms the yield, or "edible portion" of a given item factors into its actual cost, which is necessary for chefs to consider when accounting for how to price a dish. Should you be calculating every element that goes into your home-cooked meals? Certainly not. (Or rather, hopefully not? Given the state of the economy and the price of eggs, some of us might have to.) But culinary math can help determine what you're actually spending in the produce aisle versus what you're potentially wasting. Whether you're about saving pennies or saving the environment by considering food w ... Read full article.