Turning old bread into flour and then into tasty tortillas

What started with a “stir crazy” chef armed with a Nutribullet during lockdown, is now an award-winning company looking to tackle a major element of the country’s food waste problem.

Rescued Kitchen is aiming to cut down on one food most commonly ending up in the bin – bread – which it is turning back into the very flour it was made from.

This week it was revealed Kiwis are wasting over one million tonnes of food each year.

While the business is currently only able to make a small dent in this number, a major upscaling operation means they are hoping to eventually take a mighty slice out of the country’s food waste.

Royce Bold, the inventor of Rescued Bread Flour, admits taking bread back to the main ingredient it started as is not an easy idea to get your head around.

He said while it may be scientific, it is not rocket science.

“Bread is pretty much 70% wheat, 30% water, a little bit of yeast salt and sugar, that’s good old-fashioned bread.”

“We dehydrate the bread, and once it’s got the right water activity it’s then ground into a fine power, it’s then sieved and that’s when it becomes bread flour.”

From there, the flour goes into cakes, biscuits, baking mixes and more, acting as a more sustainable substitute to a regular flour.

With the flour and the various treats it is made from now being supplied to hotels, catering companies and other businesses, it is fair to say things have come a long way since Bold first came up with the idea.

“Basically, I made the first batch of bread flour during lockdown in my oven and a Nutribullet and it was one of those ‘what the’ moments.”

The bread is donated by supermarkets two days before its sell-by date.

While it doesn’t act exactly like the flour people are used to, Bold said it has it’s own unique selling points.

“The first thing I made out of it was a sweet pastry and it rolled really well which I was quite amazed with, and then when I cooked it, it had a really unique oatiness to it and a really short crumble to it and it was kind of a taste sensation, and then from there I was like this has got limitless applications.”

Five years later, Bold isn’t the only one enjoying the recycled flour.

When Arturo Luna from Remarkable Tortillas was approached by Bold with the idea to try out a batch of tortillas using the bread flour, he didn’t hesitate to jump on board.

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, Luna said he has lost track of the number of tweaks that have been made since the first trial.

“It wasn’t a straight path, we were doing a good job at the beginning and said yeah it’s working, but one thing is you finish a product and it looks nice, then you also have the shelf life of the tortilla is important, and the texture and the flavour and the actual product itself not moulding, there’s so many variants.”

But after all that trial and error, the tortillas have exceeded all expectations, with the company planning to soon produce their smallest tortilla size using only recycled flour.

“From the feedback we have been getting, the flavour is better than a usual flour tortilla, and it has a more rich flavour, it has a little bit of bread flavour in there which makes it nicer than just a flour tortilla, it’s nice and soft, and it’s sustainable.”

Bold said it is collaborations like these that have allowed them to continue to scale up.

Now they’re not just saving bread.

Twice a week a huge shipment of tomatoes arrives.

Too red, too orange, or too green, too small, too wonky or just not quite right. To the naked eye they look delicious, but they are not good enough to make into onto the supermarket shelves.

While they used to be binned, the Rescued Kitchen transforms them into chutneys, relishes, and the sauce that ends up in school lunches around the country.

But Bold said it is still just the beginning.

“So far we’ve rescued about 200 tonnes of bread, which is quite substantial, but unfortunately it’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

The current process to make the bread flour can take up to a week to make 400kg of the flour, and the time makes the product expensive.

Now the team are partway through upscaling to different system that can process one tonne of bread a day.

“We’ve done a bit of difference, but the only way that we can truly make a difference in the food waste problem that’s facing our planet, not just NZ but our whole planet is by scale.”

The team at Rescued Kitchen hopes to have an upscaled production system up and running by early next year.