11-07-2025
- General
- South China Morning Post
Hong Kong chefs turn food waste into delicious dishes for cookbook highlighting leftovers
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When there are leftover lemon peels, chef Barry Quek makes dry assam lemon noodles.
The Singaporean executive chef of Whey, a one-Michelin-star restaurant in Hong Kong, was among nine top chefs recruited to offer recipes for a new book called Conscious Cooking – Asian Delights.
The book – a collaborative project between the University of Hong Kong (HKU)'s school of biological sciences, the Green Hospitality platform, and food-saving app Chomp – aims to help reduce food waste by showing how to turn undesirable kitchen scraps into useful ingredients for delicious dishes.
'Traditionally, assam [also known as asam] is tamarind paste, or something very sour like the dish assam laksa,' Quek explains. 'We incorporate a lot of lemon peels into the assam paste, and it goes really well with other assam ingredients like ginger, pork, flour, tamarind and shallot.
'Another way to use lemon peel is to salt it, along with white asparagus trimmings, a few star anise, cinnamon and coriander seeds, then just let it ferment for use next season. Just let it pickle.'
Dry assam lemon noodles by chef Barry Quek is one of the recipes in Conscious Cooking – Asian Delights.
Hong Kong generates roughly 3,400 tonnes of food waste a day. Among Asian metropolises, it is one of the worst culprits.
