“Scarti” means waste in Italian, and it is a way to show how ingredients that we used to throw away can become not only a “recycled” family meal from yesteryears, but a haute cuisine dish focused on sustainability. Pasta I have chosen is a shapewise called “mischiato potente”, a mix of different shapes.

In the past, pasta was sold by weight from big bags, not packed like today, and the mixed remains were sold at a discount price to poor people, who could this way afford the best Gragnano pasta.

The mixed pasta is whisked in a vegetable jus, made with all the skins, husks and other waste we produce in the kitchen. At the bottom of the dish I use kefir soured milk to remind at the moments when we open the fridge to throw away expired dairy products. To finish the dish I spread over the pasta a dust of breadcrumbs and ground coffee, as the best tradition from the South of Italy, where they put brown breadcrumbs made from old dry bread and olive oil to enrich pasta – in the past times, when they could rarely afford meat and fish, it was the only way they could.

Eugenio J.C. Boer, Essenza (Milano, Italy)