Nancy Birtwhistle won last year's Great British Bake Off. © Love Food Hate Waste
The winner of last year’s Great British Bake Off has teamed up with a food waste charity to launch a pop-up restaurant with an unusual secret ingredient.
Love Food Hate Waste tasked Nancy Birtwhistle with creating a three-course menu featuring stale bread in every meal. The charity hoped that the idea would raise awareness of the amount of bread discarded in British households every year; its research found that 24m slices of bread were thrown away in the UK every day, and that almost one in five Brits had admitted to binning a forgotten loaf without even opening it.
Birtwhistle – winner of last year’s BBC baking competition – prepared a niçoise salad with black olive croutons; moussaka with a breadcrumb topping; and summer terrine pudding at an event in London’s Borough Market.
The pop-up restaurant formed part of Love Food Hate Waste’s Use Your Loaf campaign.
Birtwhistle said: “There’s an assumption with people, my family included, that stale bread means ‘gone off’ bread, fit for the bin. But in actual fact stale bread is an ingredient, and we need it for every course in the menu I cooked today.
“It wasn’t until I came out of the kitchen at the end of the meal and revealed that stale bread had been used in each dish that they all gasped! But though the bread was stale, they raved about how much they enjoyed it.’’
Love Food Hate Waste’s Emma Marsh continued: “We are a nation of bread lovers – from the classic sandwich to good old-fashioned beans on toast.
“It is shocking to think of all that bread going to waste each year just from our homes
“That’s why we are thrilled to be working in partnership with Nancy to help the nation ensure that our beloved bread can be used in so many ways.’’
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