A Recipe for Zero-Waste Magic

Guckenheimer Chef Almitra Williams was named runner-up in a global recipe competition facilitated by Winnow, a leading tech organization (and longtime Guckenheimer partner) that uses AI tools to track food waste in commercial kitchens. As part of Winnow’s #100Recipesfor100M competition, Almitra created a hand-rolled carrot pappardelle, featuring her signature “caranara” sauce, which was a standout among more than 150 entries from chefs around the world.

The competition was launched to celebrate a landmark milestone: companies and chefs who partner with Winnow have mitigated more than $100 million in food waste annually.

For Almitra, her dish wasn’t a one-off, but rather an extension of how she’s cooked since she was young.

Finding Her Passion

Almitra is one of eight, raised on about 96 acres where almost everything her family needed came from the land or her mother’s imagination. “My mother was a huge advocate of zero waste,” she says. “She turned old pillowcases into clothes, we would have dolls made out of corn silk sometimes.” If something didn’t need to be bought, it wasn’t.

That ethos extended to the dinner table, where Almitra eventually took matters into her own hands. “I was not a picky kid, but I asked very early on if I could be responsible for my own food,” she says. Her mother handed her a cookbook. Almitra went through every page, learning techniques as she went, and soon her brothers were asking her what was for dinner.

That homegrown apprenticeship eventually carried her to Los Angeles, where she went on to own and operate a vegan restaurant. “We were able to really show Los Angeles what we could do with such minimal ingredients and produce stunning, beautiful dishes that were very conscious on sustainability,” she says.

The Origins of “Caranara”

The dish that earned Almitra’s runner-up nod started, as many good dishes do, with a problem to solve. A client with a nightshade allergy loved Italian food but couldn’t tolerate tomato, so Almitra began experimenting with novel ingredients.

What emerged was her “caranara” sauce: a bright orange sauce that mimics the flavor and depth of marinara, built from carrots, herbs, onions and garlic. The client became obsessed with it, and Almitra suspected others might love it just as much.

The dish is also a quiet tribute to her mother, who is part Sicilian, and to the pasta-centered dining experiences Almitra grew up with. But more than that, it’s a study in what most kitchens throw away. The pappardelle are hand-rolled, using carrot peels and the “ugly” top parts most cooks would never plate. The gremolata topping is built from bread ends ground into savory crumbs and the salami lardons are cut from the very end of a salami — a part that typically gets tossed.

“This recipe was a passion project born from that zero-waste ethos, transforming kitchen offcuts into something worth celebrating,” Almitra says.

An Ingredient You Can’t Buy

When asked what drives her success, Almitra doesn’t talk about technique or training. She talks about cultivating a sense of wonder.

“It’s important not to lose your childlike wonder, not to lose the magic,” she says. “They joke at work because I’ll get a niche produce item and start squealing out of excitement. I’m always going to be a student. When you still have that whimsy and magic, you can taste it in the food.”

It’s a fitting answer from a chef whose entire approach is built on noticing what other people overlook, like how to use atypical items to create exceptional meals or develop recipes that help everyone feel welcome at the table.

“I’d love to continue having the platform to tell the community to think twice before throwing something in the trash. Could it be compost? Can it be stock? Can it become something new and better?”

In Almitra’s hands, the answer is almost always yes.