Milan has its undisputed queen of comfort food: the Milanese cutletwhich for centuries has been appreciated and tasted by the Lombardy (and not only). The chef Carlo Cracco However, he “dared”, deciding to play a brave card: no meat, only advanced bread and “waste” transformed into an idea of cutlet that made a horde of social criticism unleashes.
His “Milan that advances” is a cutlet … without a cutlet. The main ingredient? Bread of the day before, soaked in a restricted broth obtained from the waste of meat and fried in butter and olive oil. To those who love recovery and hate waste could like the idea, but the online comments were far from tender.
Many have not forgiven the fact that the chef called “cutlet” a meat -free dish, which seemed a free provocation. There are those who shouted to sacrilege, those who accused Cracco to “make fun” and at the end of having made only a bruschetta, and the critic Valerio Visintin even ironized on the ingenious invention of the “fried bread for 40 euros”.
Under the video published on Instagram, the audience’s reaction was not long in coming, and between ironic emojis and sarcasm in palates, the dish immediately made it talk about itself. There are those who wrote: “But it is a piece of fried bread with serious, it is a piece of fried bread“, And who, referring to the restaurant prices, wrote:”Sor fracco, if you sell me at your prices a touch of stale bread, split it by cutlet, I fry you“. Others have let themselves go to judgments such as”Just in Milan it can find space this stuff“Or“How the starred take us for the bottoms … really an insult “the latter among the most appreciated by users.
There are also those who renamed the dish “The bruschetta of the century“And who wonders with irony”I would be curious to know how much it costs“.
But then: is it a crazy idea, a clever or a high cuisine proposal?
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The Milan that advances
Starting from the assumption that the cuisine is also innovation, experimentation, breakage of the patterns, Cracco took a historical dish, symbol of Milan and the Lombard tradition, upsetting it completely. It is obviously not a “savings” dish in the classic sense, but of a creative exercise that uses waste with intelligence – hard bread, bones, scraps of broth meat – and transforms them into something new.
The procedure is far from trivial: the bread is wet in the broth full of moods and flavors, it is breaded, fry, and finally it is intinge in an acid sauce that recalls carpione. In short, not a simple “piece of fried bread” as the detractors say, but a game of textures and flavors, whether it likes or not.
As the insiders explain, The “Milan that advances” must be inserted in the context of a wider tasting menu, Where each dish is a story, a stage of a culinary journey. If we areolated it, we risk misunderstood it, as if it were just a free experiment.
But is it therefore antispreco or only marketing?
The recipe takes advantage of “recovery” ingredients, but it is not properly a poor kitchen dish or designed to save money. Rather, it is an exercise in style, an attempt to make tradition dialogue with modernity and respect for resources, all seasoned with a good dose of audacity (and a starred restaurant price).
