FOOD & DRINK From the finest kitchen scraps in the city, Wilson Bauer summons the best worm poop

Flour Power’s pasta chef rescues nearly every bit of food waste his kitchen produces and composts it into plant magic.

By MIKE SULA

Wilson Bauer’s campanelle with oxtail had an impeccable pedigree. The bell-shaped pasta was kneaded with filtered water and imported Italian semolina flour. The braised and shredded beef was harvested from cows who lived out their lives on verdant, rotating, downstate pastures. The green garlic was grown at Middle Fork Farm, a regenerative farm near Bloomington, and the parsley came from Carroll’s Timber Edge Farm near Pontiac. The chef finished the dish with a hit of orange zest and a squeeze of lime from fruit grown on an organic ranch in California’s San Gabriel Valley.

When Bauer finished prepping this pasta last spring, the excess vegetable scraps and bits of dough that never escaped his extruder joined an ever-growing collection in the freezer at Flour Power, his Ukrainian Village pasta joint.

Once a week, Bauer throws an icy lump of this organic slurry into his stand mixer and beats it to a pulp. The freeze-thaw process breaks down the plant matter’s cell walls, which gives it a particularly attractive quality.

“It’s kind of slimy,” he says. “That’s what the worms really seem to like.” The red wigglers and Indian blues that live in Bauer’s apartment bathroom got a taste of the oxtails too. He incinerated them into biochar, which doesn’t do much for the worms themselves but contributes necessary carbon to the matrix.

For more than a year, Flour Power has produced almost no food waste. It all gets tossed into two large Amazon courier totes Bauer stores just to the right of his toilet. To this he adds pulverized egg shells; weathered and shredded, untreated cardboard boxes; and paper flour sacks left to soak in the rain in the alley behind the restaurant. Occasionally he adds amendments from his neighbors’ dumpsters: coffee grounds from Standing Passengers and spent brewers’ grains from Forbidden Root.

“That stuff sets the bins on fire,” he says. “The microbes just love that stuff.” The worms, however, don’t, so those are added in moderation.

Since Bauer started this meticulous composting regimen, he figures his worms have excreted some 175 pounds of castings, black gold he gives away to friends—medical marijuana users who feed it to their cannabis plants, and a few vegetable gardeners.

“I’ve always been a bit bothered by how cannabis fertilizer companies make it so expensive to grow,” he says. “I’m really bothered by how expensive legalization has made cannabis and somehow diminished quality.”

Bauer grows his own as well, at a friend’s place. “These castings are what’s keeping my friends’ indoor gardens growing. The plants I have there are out of control.”

Before he made his bones in Chicago, cook-