Wondering what to do with potato peels? Discover 15 useful ways to reuse leftover potato skins, from crispy snacks and soup to compost and clever garden uses.
Don’t Throw Those Potato Peels Away!
Today I was standing in my kitchen peeling potatoes to make Iraqi tabsi when I looked down at the pile of potato peels on my chopping board.
Normally, I would have thrown them straight into the bin.
But this time I stopped and thought: What can I actually do with potato peels?
If you’ve read my other “don’t throw it away” ideas, you probably know what happened next. 😂 I started looking for useful ways to reuse them instead.
It turns out that potato peels don’t necessarily belong in the rubbish. Depending on the potatoes and how they’ve been prepared, they can be turned into crispy snacks, added to recipes or put to work in the garden and compost bin.
So before you throw away your next pile, here are some practical things you can do with leftover potato peels.
Important: If you’re planning to eat the peels, start with sound potatoes, wash and scrub them thoroughly, and avoid green or badly sprouted potatoes. Potatoes naturally contain glycoalkaloids, and levels can be higher in green or sprouting potatoes. Food Standards Australia New Zealand notes that peeling can reduce glycoalkaloid levels.
1- Make Crispy Potato Peel Chips:
This was the first idea I tried—and I was genuinely surprised by how good they were! While making Iraqi tabsi, I had a pile of potato peels left over and decided to turn them into a quick crispy snack instead of throwing them away.
Ingredients:
- Fresh potato peels
- Chicken salt, to taste
- Olive oil spray
Instructions:
1- Spread the potato peels in a single layer on a baking-paper-lined tray.
2- Season with chicken salt.
3- Spray lightly with olive oil.
4- Set the oven to fan grill at 220°C (428°F).
5- Cook for approximately 18 minutes, checking them toward the end as thinner pieces may brown faster.
6- Remove when golden and crispy and serve immediately.
Other ways to use crispy potato peels: Instead of eating them only as a snack, crumble them over soups or salads for extra crunch, or use them as a crispy garnish. You can also experiment with different seasonings or try cooking them in an air fryer.
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2- Make Potato Peel Soup:
This one surprised me.
Potato peel soup is a real food-waste recipe rather than one of those strange internet hacks.
Love Food Hate Waste has a potato-peel soup using roughly 200 g of peelings with onion, milk, stock and seasonings, cooked until tender and blended smooth.
So if you’re peeling a large batch of potatoes, save the peels and turn them into an entirely different meal.
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3- Add Potato Peels to Homemade Vegetable Stock:
If you already save onion ends, carrot peelings, celery leaves and herb stems for homemade vegetable stock, potato peels can join the collection.
Use them as one component rather than filling the whole pot with potato skins, since too much can make the stock starchy.
One easy system is keeping a freezer container for suitable vegetable scraps and adding to it until you have enough to make stock.
Tip: If you don’t have enough vegetable scraps to make stock right away, keep a labelled container or reusable bag in your freezer. Whenever you have suitable scraps—such as carrot ends, celery pieces, herb stems, onion scraps or clean potato peels—add them to the container. Once you’ve collected enough, use them together to make homemade vegetable stock.
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4- Dehydrate Potato Peels:
If you own a food dehydrator, another option is drying clean potato peels rather than immediately discarding them.
Dried potato skins can be stored for later culinary experimentation or ground after proper preparation, although this is one I’d personally treat as an experimental use rather than making big nutritional promises about “potato peel powder.” Dehydrating peels is also used by other food-waste/home-frugality cooks. Source
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5- Put Potato Peels in Your Compost:
Don’t fancy eating them?
Your compost bin is probably a much better destination than the rubbish.
Potato peels are organic plant material and can be incorporated with the other ingredients in a balanced compost pile.
Chop large pieces if you want them to break down more readily and bury/mix food scraps into the pile rather than leaving a heap of potato peels exposed on top.
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6- Feed Small Amounts to a Worm Farm:
Potato waste can also be broken down in vermicomposting systems.
As with most worm-bin foods, don’t suddenly dump a giant bucket of one ingredient into a small worm farm. Add manageable amounts and monitor how quickly the worms process them.
If your household already has a worm farm, this gives your peels another route back into the garden rather than into general waste.
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7- Use Potato Peels as a Temporary Slug Lure:
Here’s a garden experiment I want to try.
Potato pieces and peels can attract slugs. Rather than thinking of that as a magical “slug killer,” use it as a lure: place peels beneath a board, pot or similar shelter in an affected area and check the hiding place later, removing the slugs you find.
This distinction matters—the peel itself isn’t solving your slug problem. It’s helping concentrate the pests somewhere you can find them.
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8- Bury Small Amounts in a Compost Trench:
Another option is trench composting.
Instead of putting appropriate kitchen scraps into a compost bin, bury them deeply enough in an unused garden area and allow soil organisms and microorganisms to break the organic material down over time.
I wouldn’t bury large piles immediately beside precious plants or leave peels exposed where they can attract pests.
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9- Sometimes, Don’t Peel the Potato at All!
Perhaps the easiest way to avoid wasting potato peels is not creating them in the first place.
For dishes where the texture works, scrub the potatoes thoroughly and cook them with their skins intact.
And when a recipe really does need peeled potatoes—as my tabsi did today—you’ve now got plenty of ideas for using those peels too.
Can You Eat Potato Peels?
In many circumstances, yes—properly prepared potato skins are eaten routinely.
But don’t turn “zero waste” into “I must eat every potato regardless of its condition.”
Avoid using green or badly sprouted potatoes for your peel snacks. Glycoalkaloids occur naturally in potatoes, and inappropriate storage and greening can increase the concern; peeling is one measure that can reduce exposure.
Wash potatoes thoroughly before using their skins in food.
Are Potato Peels Healthy?
Potato peels can be a nutritious part of the potato. They contain dietary fibre and various nutrients and plant compounds. Keeping the skin also means you’re using more of the food instead of throwing part of it away.
However, that doesn’t mean every potato peel should be eaten. Wash and scrub potatoes thoroughly before using the skins, and avoid eating peels from potatoes that are green, damaged or heavily sprouted. Green and sprouting potatoes can contain higher levels of naturally occurring glycoalkaloids.
And, of course, how you prepare the peels matters too. Turning them into crispy chips with a light spray of olive oil, like I did, is quite different nutritionally from deep-frying them or covering them with large amounts of salt.
Are Potato Peels Good for the Garden?
They can be useful as organic material, particularly through composting.
What I would not do is repeat the internet claim that soaking potato peels in water somehow creates a complete miracle fertiliser for every plant.
Plants need nutrients in appropriate amounts and forms. Composting the peels allows decomposition to take place as part of a much broader biological process.
That’s considerably less exciting than “THIS POTATO WATER WILL MAKE YOUR TOMATOES EXPLODE!” but it’s much more useful advice.
Before You Throw Away Your Next Potato Peel…
I started researching this simply because I was making dinner and didn’t want to throw away the pile sitting on my chopping board.
And that’s one of my favourite things about reducing household waste: you don’t necessarily need to buy special products or completely change your lifestyle.
Sometimes you just need to look at something you’re about to throw away and ask:
Could I use this for something else first?
Today it was potato peels.
And apparently, dinner turned into another experiment in my kitchen. 😂
Related ideas:
24 Things to Do With Milk Before It Expires
21 Things You Can Do With Leftover Bread
20 Ways to Reuse Used Coffee Grounds
Reasons to Keep Silica Gel Packets
plus any existing banana-peel, orange-peel, onion-scrap, eggshell or tea-bag articles you have.