Due to its incomparable flavor and also its practicality, Milanese is one of the foods with the greatest presence on Argentine tables. But in recent times, one of the main inputs for its preparation is missing: breadcrumbs.
It turns out that many small businesses and neighborhood butcher shops have difficulties these days to get breadcrumbs and prepare raw milanesas ready to fry or bake.
Breadcrumbs are typically the day’s leftover bread from bakeries, which can no longer be sold to consumers because it has lost its freshness. According to several merchants consulted by The voice, the bakers who produce and sell this product currently only make the number of kilos of bread that they know for sure that they are going to sell. Therefore, at the end of the day they have almost no leftover bread to produce breadcrumbs the next day.
According to the Córdoba Bakers and Allied Industrial Center (Cipac), bakeries choose to adjust their production as much as possible, with the idea that their costs do not escape them. This is how the bakers who are in neighborhoods and in areas far from the center of the city of Córdoba, have been producing bread as they sell their product, trying not to have any surplus left.
“For our business, all that is left over is loss. Because, although the bread from the day before can be turned into breadcrumbs, the investment in raw material required for production is not recovered”, explains Marcelo Caula, president of Cipac.
“Breadcrumbs are a product that sells well, although the price that is handled is not the real one, and it ends up being sold below cost,” said the manager.
The referent explained that the adjustment of the volume of daily bread production is a widespread phenomenon in Cordovan bakeries, due to the high costs of inputs.
Butchers and grocers may choose to use the packaged breadcrumbs available in supermarkets. However, they explain that it is an industrialized product that “does not have the same quality as the breadcrumbs made by bakers, which have no fat content.”
For the moment, the largest companies dedicated to the elaboration of milanesas do not register the lack of breadcrumbs, since they are supplied from other producers that are also larger.
Breadcrumbs are generally used as a batter for different types of meat, to make milanesas. But it is also widely used as a binding medium, for example for the preparation of hamburgers or meatballs.
bake prices
A month ago, all bakery products suffered a strong price increase, of the order of 15%. French bread went to $520 per kilo, while bread mignon rose to $580. The kilo of common Creoles went on to sell for $1,000 and common bills, $120 per unit.
Added to all this is the recent removal of a national subsidy on the domestic price of flour, which not only impacted the costs of making bakery products, but also fresh pasta.
“Before, there were several types of subsidized flour that arrived in Córdoba, although in very small quotas and there were few tambourines that accessed the benefit,” said Caula.
