Cooking with Love and Waste

Massimo Bottura is a socially engaged chef. What Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns does for sustainable agriculture, the Netflix-famous Bottura does for a fairer distribution of food and against food waste. This is also the subject of his book Bread Is Gold, about cooking with love and waste during the World Expo in Milan.

During the 2015 World Expo, themed ‘Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life’, Massimo Bottura of Osteria Francescana in Modena opened a pop-up refettorio in the heart of Milan. A soup kitchen where the chef known from the first Netflix season of Chef’s Table had more than 50 top chefs from all over the world cook for underprivileged local children and homeless people in the Milanese district where the pop-up was located, at the same time as the six-month Expo.

Overripe dates

They cooked exclusively with discarded food. Overripe dates, trimmings and lots of stale bread – after all, the food that is thrown away most often. From Daniel Humm, the Swiss chef of Eleven Madison Park in NYC, René ‘there he is again’ Redzepi of restaurant Noma in Copenhagen and Alain Ducasse, to Joan Roca of El Cellar de Can Rocca in Girona, Spain. They all lovingly improvised à la minute with whatever discarded food from the Expo had happened to be collected that day.

Not a lightweight coffee-table book with slick photography and recipes for poké bowls

The book Bread Is Gold grew out of this project. Not a lightweight coffee-table book with slick photography and recipes for poké bowls or green smoothies. Instead, it is a soberly designed account of a social project, with plenty of beautiful action photography and room for the chefs’ ideas and their unusual but highly achievable recipes for ‘golden’ dishes, as Bottura calls them. For example, pesto with popcorn or breadcrumbs instead of expensive pine nuts, ice cream made from stale bread and strawberry gazpacho.

(Un)usually delicious

However socially motivated both the refettorio and the book may be, for Bottura & Friends the most important thing is that the food is (un)usually delicious. The message Massimo Bottura conveys to the reader of this book is that anyone can combat food waste simply by cooking and sharing a meal. ‘It may be the most revolutionary act of your day.’ But buying the book, with its more than one hundred recipes, is already a good deed in itself. All royalties go to the non-profit organisation Food for Soul, which fights food waste.

And why is the book called Bread Is Gold? It is a tribute to the dish Bottura’s grandmother made for him in his youth from breadcrumbs, warm milk and sugar.

Title: Bread Is Gold, unusually delicious food with ordinary ingredients
Author: Massimo Bottura & Friends
Publisher: Terra
Price: €39,99