Identità Milano, first inspirations

The ninth curtain has been raised over Identità Golose’s international cuisine congress: a broken veil over gastronomy, in all its various facets. Leaving behind the iconoclast and bad-tempered season of the continuous let’s start from scratch, the chosen theme is that of respect: chefs bow to products, to the client and to tradition. If this is not a bounce backwards, it is a step to the side, relativizing the central, dominating signature role during the Spanish siglo de oro.

No one better than Massimiliano Alajmo, with his religious sensitivity and his love for paradox, could have avoided the lurking reaction. Indeed. “To assert a concept it is necessary to contradict it”, he began. His talk was thus dedicated to “cold-cooking”, that is to say those processes that, through the denaturation of proteins, induce similar changes to those given by high temperatures, such as the case of cool vacuum brine macerated vegetables for a new concept of salad and raw breaded fillet-like cod. This is somewhere in between anti-cooking and automatic cooking: a wind that blows from Copenhagen to Sao Paolo.

Ezio Santin then passed the baton to Fabio Barbaglini, his heir at the Cassinetta. This was the deserved tribute to a great past, for which the word “respect” is not enough. His prawns, served raw back when no one would have imagined something like this, with caviar instead of salt and onion to add spiciness, have built a bridge over the strait between cutting-edge contemporaneity and visionary nouvelle cuisine: the utmost provocation. As for Barbaglini, he has replied with his prawns in angostura, with diced apples, caviar, raw turnip and green pepper. A more “frugal” remake, in line with contemporary aesthetics. This was followed by Massimiliano Alajmo’s pasta-reply.

Simone Padoan and Franco Pepe have lifted the national banner of pizza over the congress. Theirs is a classic though hyper-technical and excellent rigour. It is 100% hand-skills, in comparison with a pure research on the edge with irreverence. To jump ahead, the forced dichotomy risked breaking the sacred disc in half.

The day dedicated to young lions first roared with Lorenzo Cogo, whom Paolo Marchi compared to Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince. “I need the definition of ‘instinctive cuisine’ so that people won’t label me, as I try to give Italian cuisine a future following only my instincts”, he began. His instinct, however, is very well educated, since he has assimilated decades of world culinary research in the flashes of his synapses. The Redzepian foraging has hinged the torresano pigeon, as traditional as it is forgotten, which, at the Coq is char-grilled. To finish it, there’s the instant smoking that comes from the forest: the result is both original and anti-minimalist. Italian vanguard, however, borrowing Leonardo’s words, is first all “something of the mind”. Then there was the grand finale with the conceptualism of Fecondazione, an anti-stress dish for pregnant women. Following more or less the techniques used by local breeders, the trout eggs cooked in dashi for the umami sided quark for the milk component, onion for a wink at Davide Scabin’s Bulgari (onions=pheromones) and the trout’s sperm.