I’ve always found the world of desserts fascinating, and not just because I’m very fond of sweets. I like conceiving them, develop them and cook them, because they require both your stomach and your mind to work together. And your palate and your brain too. I like them because they always arrive at the end of a meal, as the last step in a journey that has perhaps included some other 10 or 12 dishes.
Therefore, they lead you to a challenge: you have to offer something that is worthy of the salty and the bitter, the iodine and the iron, the sapid and the spicy, the alcoholic and the sour flavours that preceded. Something that could give a sense and at the same time doesn’t contrast with what you have eaten till that moment. Because they participate in the end of the meal, pastry-chefs are often relegated to a rather marginal and secluded role. They have always worked hard to get out of the isolation, trying to look for notes and themes that would be complex and personal. An emblematic case is that of Gualtiero Marchesi: at his restaurant, we made excellent desserts, but they had little to share with his cuisine. It’s starting from this consideration that in our restaurant we’ve always try to create a link with the kingdom of desserts and that of savoury dishes, to introduce some sapid notes in the desserts, in order to create a continuity with what comes before.
Trying to break the domination of 100% sweet dessert, which often end up being sickening, you can take the case of Neapolitan babà. I love it. However, no matter how perfect your preparation may be, offering it at the end of a very complex tasting menu would mean giving the final blow, putting a brick into the stomach of your guest. It will always arrive as a UFO at the end of the meal.
This is why, if we really must, we serve babà as a petit-four: we make a small savoury one, on which some meat sauce is poured, and it is served with marrow. It is following the same concept that one adds some capers to the dessert, for instance. Or even some vegetables, as in the case of the liquorish-aromatised artichokes served next to a hazelnut-brittle ice-cream. Nonetheless, I believe the most complete dessert we have ever prepared was the Chocolate, chinotto and caviar croquette: the sweet and salty notes are in perfect balance with the alcohol, the chocolate, the breading, the liquid component and the crispy one. It’s a mosaic made with pieces that stay perfectly one next to the other.
While the salty notes need to be perceived in the dessert, it is interesting when the opposite happens, that is to say when you add a sweet note to a savoury menu. In this case, we don’t discover anything new because the (rather pleasing) idea behind dishes such as pumpkin and amaretto ravioli, orange duck or caramelised onions dates back to Roman times. And in Asia, for instance, it has always been very common.
For all these reasons, it is essential for the pastry-chef in a restaurant to become an active and basic element in the kitchen. He shouldn’t be kept beside a wall, as it is often the case in high quality restaurants, where the pastry-making workshop is most of the times separated from all the rest. At the same time, a great chef needs to know how to control the temperature, the humidity, the strength, just like a pastry-chef does. He needs to do everything, just like Pierre Hermè, a master in pastry-making but an excellent savoury chef too. Or like Michel Bras, a great chef who has had a worldwide influence thanks to his Chocolate cake with a warm heart. A great pastry-chef needs to understand, interpret and judge without ever excluding any hypothesis. He must become a chef of all things.
Carlo Cracco
chef owner of the two Michelin starred restaurant Cracco in Milan
