Hot cross crumb cheesecake

Waste not, want not

I’ve been thinking a lot about food waste this week. Not the kind that actually matters, the large scale, industrial type that sees tonnes of good food go to waste rather than go to those who need it.

No, I mean the small, inconsequential kind, the type I worry about far more often and with much less reason. The butt of a loaf of bread I can’t bear to bin; the chicken bones I cling to in the hope of making stock; the long-since wilted herbs I sadly, regretfully, toss a few days after I should have. This is the type of food waste I devote far too much mental energy to worrying about, twisting my cooking into contortions to incorporate ingredients that might otherwise be destined for the dustbin.

I could trace its roots to my parents perhaps, or over-eager teachers in my primary school canteen. “There are starving children in Africa, you know,” was the standard refrain directed at any seven-year-old who tried to rush to the playground to trade Pokémon cards without doggedly eating every last pea on their plate first. Unwittingly they planted a seed that would germinate 25 years later into genuine guilt over letting lettuce go bad.

Food waste has been especially on my mind this week for a couple of reasons. One is the beginnings of my efforts at sourdough. What they don’t tell you about sourdough starters is that keeping one active means feeding it for a few days before you bake, which in turn means getting rid of a good chunk of what’s there already, to replace with fresh flour. The bit you remove is your ‘discard’, an oozing, bubbling mix of flour and water that I can never quite bear to bin. 

Some bakers advise all sorts of recipes you can throw a little discard into, mostly to sub for the flour and water in other loaves — a perfect solution, so long as you’re hoping to pair your first slice of oven-warm, freshly baked sourdough with another, slightly different bread. I’m trying to relax about carbs, but I have my limits.

Instead, this week I’ve fallen back on a half-remembered habit from my last bout of baking: sourdough pikelets, a sort of cross between a pancake and a crumpet that just needs a dash of baking soda and salt added to the discard to transform it into a frothy batter with a subtly sour taste. 

I’m too impatient to fry these any way other than ‘misshapen’, and use them as an excuse to clear more condiments: the end of my tiny tin of crème de marrons, and one of about twenty remaining single-serving, heart-shaped tubs of Marmite I bought for a bad joke several years ago. They apparently expired in 2021, but other than thickening to a slightly more solid sludge than usual, you can’t really tell.

Pikelets haven’t really been my food waste focus though: I’ve been embroiled in a freezer clearout. No, not because I’m one of those irritatingly well put together people who actually defrosts it on the regular. I simply need to empty it by next weekend, when I intend to make ungodly quantities of dumplings and need the space for new leftovers.

Over recent weeks, we’ve eaten one frozen brownie, a few slices of birthday cake, and a bag of cookie dough. I’ve cleared what was left of one of those bags of tiny cut frozen vegetables that are only really good in egg fried rice and aren’t all that great there either. I even did finally make that stock, a motley assortment of poultry bones forming the base for a chicken and thyme pie.

But the culmination of my efforts came this weekend, in a cheesecake constructed almost entirely of leftovers. First, the base. This was the second cheesecake I’ve made over the past year using hot cross bun crumbs instead of biscuits, a moment of inspiration hatched from some truly catastrophic baking last Easter — remember folks, yeast extract may not expire, but yeast sure as hell does.

Those tough, dense discs of dried fruit and breadcrumb were borderline inedible, but that didn’t stop me. A few bouts in the blender and some drying out in a low oven produced a fruity, flavourful crumb that’s lived in my freezer ever since. The texture has never quite been right — paradoxically both too chewy and too hard, and a little too close to gravel for my liking — but the heavy spicing and fragments of fruit make up for it, a perfect foil for the sharp sweetness of a cheesecake topping.

The cheese itself was easy: we hosted friends for bagels before heading to one of London’s big pro-Palestine marches last autumn. We said we’d cover the cream cheese; no-one listened. We’ve had four full tubs gathering dust in the fridge ever since, a February best-before date now fast approaching.

The hot cross bottom made me think of adding orange zest or marmalade to the mix, but another idea presented itself in the form of two jars of apricot jam we didn’t want. One was left, half-eaten, by recent house guests; the other I’ve owned, unopened, for more years than I’d care to admit, a parting gift from a press visit to an over-priced Piccadilly Italian restaurant that’s now long gone. We couldn’t quite finish the latter off, but at least we’re making headway, even if it took the better part of a decade to get there. 

A few smears spread throughout our batter — itself an unholy fusion of Nigella Lawson and Felicity Cloake’s respective baked New York cheesecake recipes — and we had a cupboard clear-out in dessert form.

It didn’t so much crack in the oven as fissure along apricot faultlines; charitably, you could call this 3D marbling, and in truth I rather like the end effect. Professional? Perhaps not. But not very much about the process was either, in case you couldn’t tell.

Is there a lesson to be learned from all this? Not any especially helpful one. Cling onto even literal crumbs for long enough and you can apparently get something worthwhile out of them. Perhaps that’s a parable we could all use to make a little more out of the food we buy; perhaps I really just need to get over myself and bin some of the crap in my cupboards.