- Ninety-four delicious recipes for Italy's answer to fast food - Chef
Alessandro Frassica emphasizes the use of fresh ingredients in
imaginative combinations What could be more simple than a pan'ino? Take
some bread and butter, slice it through the middle and fill it. Seen in
this way, the sandwich is almost an anti-cuisine, a nomadic shortcut
that allows for speed and little thought. But when Alessandro Frassica
thinks about his pan'ino, he considers it in a different way, not as a
shortcut, but as an instrument for telling stories, creating layers of
tales right there between the bread and its butter. Because even if the
sandwich is simple, it is not necessarily so easy to create. Alessandro
searches for ingredients, and in the raw foods he finds people:
producers of pecorino cheese from Benevento, anchovies from Cetara,
'nduja spicy salami from Calabria. Then he studies the combinations, the
consistencies and the temperature, because a pan'ino is not just a
random object; savoury must be complemented by sweet; tapenade softens
and provides moisture; bread should be warmed but not dried; thus the
sandwich becomes a simple way of saying many excellent things, including
finding a complexity of flavours that can thrill in just one bite.
