2023-12-23 16:08:00
“Toni’s bread”
“Every year before Christmas, between November and December, we prepare more than two thousand five hundred kilos of panettone dough,” explains Lorenzo Panzera. “In my family we have been making artisanal panettone for several generations. I even still have the book with my grandfather’s recipe and we still use his dough mixer,” he continues, showing an old recipe book. On the metal table, fifty kilos of golden dough stuffed with raisins and candied oranges will be cut into one-kilo loaves which will then be placed in the characteristic paper mold of panettone. “Legend says that it was Toni, Ludovico le More’s pastry chef, who invented this bread enriched with sugar and candied fruit in 1495,” explains Lorenzo Panzera, “hence its name Toni’s bread, panettone in Milanese. We only prepare it at Christmas, but the classic panettone is clearly the Italians’ favorite cake!”
Hours of levitation, a night hanging upside down following cooking, the preparation of artisanal panettone requires two days of work and although its origins are indeed Milanese, it is now made throughout Italy.
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”Le pain d’or”
In Bovolone, twenty kilometers from Verona, the Perbellini family’s mixers run day and night. Pandoro has been made here for over a century. “My ancestor was one of the pastry chefs at the Melegatti company, the one that registered the pandoro patent, one hundred and fifty years ago,” explains Andrea Perbellini. “It’s more difficult to make pandoro than panettone,” says Pierluigi, the master pastry chef of the family business, “because you turn panettone following cooking and it keeps its roundness. The pandoro should swell in a mold and when it cools if you unmold it incorrectly it will fall back like a deflated balloon. It’s like French toast, hence its name, pandoro!” Coated in a thin layer of sugar, the cake looks like a Christmas star. In Verona, in the city of Romeo and Juliet, we don’t give up, pandoro is the king of celebrations on the Italian table!
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Sweet rivalry and big business
The very serious surveys carried out on this sweet rivalry say that ninety-five percent of Italians eat at least one of the two during the holidays. And if panettone wins the Christmas derby by a few points, pandoro is especially appreciated by young people and children. “Panettone now comes in many forms, with pistachios, candied chestnuts, but the classic panettone remains the favorite,” says Diego Crosara, master pastry chef at “Marchesi 1824”. In this high-end pastry shop in Milan, absorbed by the Prada group, pandoro and panettone are decorated by hand. “This year we chose the snowball theme and everything is edible.”
Here, each cake sells for between three and five hundred euros, and is only made to order. A niche market like that of haute couture, far from the millions of round or star-shaped boxes that pile up in Italian supermarkets where the price is around five euros each. Last year, more than seventy-three thousand tons of pandoro and panettone were sold during the holidays. The market for these two kings of Christmas represents a turnover of more than seven hundred million euros including exports. Tifosi at heart, the Italians participate in this sweet Christmas derby. Panettone team or pandoro team: the two camps share the field during New Year’s Eve but in the end, the match always ends with a sharing of cakes!
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