Who owns panettone?
Over the past decade, the Christmas classic has crossed its Italian borders and acquired a global profile. Like Basque burnt cheesecake and French croissants, panettone is tested and transformed far from home, with new flavors such as black sesame, Aperol spritz and cacio e pepe. There are Japanese versions leavened with sake dregs and Brazilian versions filled with dulce de leche; supermarket minis that cost $2 and truffles that fetch almost $200.
When the standard was set, most likely in 15th-century Milan, panettone was a curvaceous sweet bread with a soft, bright golden crumb, perfumed and studded with sugared fruit. It belongs to the same luxury holiday tradition as German stollen, Polish Chalka and British fruitcake: delicacies made once a year from expensive supplies of butter and eggs, refined flour and sugar, spices from Asia and preserved fruit from the Mediterranean. Later, pieces of chocolate were added and regional ingredients such as lemon on the Amalfi Coast and hazelnuts in Piedmont.
When Italy united, panettone became a national symbol of Christmas; extravagantly wrapped loaves of bread with ribbons became status symbols and popular gifts. But with the advent of commercial baking, the product in the boxes became increasingly drier and flatter in taste, with cheaper ingredients such as candied pumpkin and powdered milk.
The wave of appreciation for panettone is both restoring interest in the bread and fueling new conflicts between those who make it. Disputes have erupted between purists and ultra-purists, between traditionalists and modernists, and between Italy and the rest of the world. The battle is playing out in unions, legislators and online, where a passionate global community of sourdough bakers speak out on issues like hydration, acidification and almonds vs. hazelnuts.
Laura Lazzaroni, a journalist and bread consultant, said panettone follows the arc followed by pizza: a food not considered particularly interesting at home catches on abroad, is adopted by foreign artisans and then returns to great fanfare.
“We never fell in love with pizza, but we didn’t think much about it,” she said. “Then people started coming home from America and saying, ‘I’ve had better pizza in California than in — insert the name of my city in Italy here — and we need to do something about it.'”
As panettone’s reputation has risen, so too is the stakes for Italian bakers, who compete not only for ownership of that tradition, but also for market share. Conpait, the confectionery group, estimates the market will be about $650 million this year, with “artigianale” over “industriali” products growing 10 percent. Best-of lists, awards and competitions like the new Coppa del Mondo del Panettone are proliferating.
“This is a world championship, not a church bake sale,” said Giuseppe Piffaretti, who started the 2019 Coppa del Mondo.
The battle to control panettone has been raging for 20 years, ever since Italian exporters raised the alarm that foreign-made versions were conquering the world market.
Panettone has long been popular in Argentina, Peru, and Brazil, where Italian food arrived along with immigrants in the late 1800s. Much of the panettone sold in American supermarkets is made in South America, especially by the giants Bauducco and D’Onofrio.
Unlike tomatoes from San Marzano or mortadella from Bologna, panettone from Milan is not a protected regional specialty under the European Union labeling system. Luigi Biasetto, a leading baker in Padua, is leading an effort to have panettone declared a world “intangible cultural heritage” by UNESCO, just like Neapolitan pizza in 2017.
In 2005, the Italian government passed laws dictating ingredients, decreeing that “natural fermentation” is required to produce panettone labeled “Made in Italy”. But the code makes no distinction between wild yeast and cultured yeast, between organic and bleached flour, between sugar-candied and glucose-containing – distinctions that have become increasingly important to bakers and customers.
Like all bread, traditional panettone was naturally leavened, giving it a flavor, crispness, and texture that was lost in translation to industry, such as the transition from aged Cheddar to American cheese.
The best combine the fluff of cotton candy, the creaminess of French toast, the smooth puff of a fresh donut, and the buttery softness of pound cake. Now modern bakers are trying to recapture those qualities, despite — or because of — the infamous challenges of making panettone from scratch.
“It’s the hardest product to make,” Mr. Piffaretti said. “Panettone is not a recipe; it’s a lifestyle.”
Iginio Massari, a nationally respected master in Brescia (his panettone is simply called “L’immortale”) said it takes 10 years to train a worker to make it correctly.
Mr. Massari’s American protege, Roy Shvartzapel, put it another way: “Panettone is the pinnacle” of baking.
It takes two separate doughs, each a challenging blend of high-gluten flours to provide structure, support long fermentation, and absorb incredibly high amounts of fat and sugar. The first dough is slowly fermented to a certain acidity level, which takes 12 to 24 hours, depending on microbial activity, and requires constant monitoring of temperature and humidity.
Despite the high skill barrier, hundreds of individual panettone producers have flocked to the mind-boggling new set of contests. The Coppa del Mondo de Panettone should not be confused with the Panettone World Championship, or with the Panettone Day competition in Milan, with the Tenzone del Panettone (panettone duel) in Parma, or with the prestigious national Artisti del Panettone competition. Japan’s Panettone Appreciation Society, founded in 2020, held its first championship last month.
“Every pastry chef now wants to run their own competition, but it’s confusing for the customers,” says Georgia Grillo, whose panettone has often reached the finals at the NeroVaniglia pastry shop in Rome. “There are too many championships.”
The Coppa del Mondo is the only major one based outside of Italy, although not far beyond: Mr. Piffaretti’s bakery is in Lugano, Switzerland, about 50 miles from Milan. Still, his contest seeks to expand panettone’s reach, admitting entries from countries such as the United States, Spain, Algeria and France. This year, a competition was held in Singapore, home to some of Asia’s most prestigious culinary schools. (Still, Italians win most of the titles, and culinary schools and hotel chains have started flying over the winners to run workshops in places like Kuala Lumpur and Mumbai.)
While each contest requires bakers to comply with Italy’s 2005 law, the other rules are often influenced by sponsors, such as the producers of Agrimontana fruit or Dallagiovanna flour, who require contestants to use their products. (Like Italian football players, Italian pastry chefs often wear uniforms plastered with sponsor logos.) These competitions are scorned by many champions, such as Mr. Biasetto, who uses only his own flour blend and a 90-year-old starter.
He and Mrs. Grillo belong to a confederation of strict sourdough purists, the Accademia dei Maestri del Lievito Madre e del Panettone (Academy of Masters of Sourdough and Panettone). The members broke away from the larger Accademia dei Maestri Pasticciere (Academy of Masters of Pastry) in 2020 over the question of whether panettone could be leavened with added yeast or with natural leavening only, called “lievito madre”. The group’s president, Claudio Gatti, called it “the only possible way to make real Italian panettone”.
Luxury patisseries and design houses such as Gucci and Fornasetti have long dominated the global artisan panettone market. Now smaller artisan bakeries are trying to step in, with popular flavors like Nutella, prestige ingredients like Belgian centrifuged butter and Madagascar vanilla beans, and new techniques. Olivieri 1882, in Vicenza, makes not only its prized classic, but also a limited “super classic”, with three types of dough and a four-day fermentation. Infermentum, in Verona, folds in candied orange and lemon pastes along with the traditional zest pieces.
The American panettone revolution has so far been spearheaded by Mr. Shvartzapel, who baked at Balthazar in New York and cooked at the French Laundry in California before plunging into pastries under Pierre Hermé in Paris, where panettone is popular. He was smitten and described his first bite as an “unctuous, delicious cloud.”
“I had never thought about it before,” he said.
But when he returned to the United States in 2006, he found himself with little else to think about. He moved to Brescia, Italy, to study with Mr. Massari. Mr. Shvartzapel returned with two goals, both donquixote: to open a bakery made entirely of panettone, and to move panettone after Christmas, with fresh fruit and seasonal flavors. Shortly after that bakery, From Roy, opened in San Francisco in 2015, the panettone landed on the “Oprah’s Favorite Things” list and a star was born.
Mr. Shvartzapel’s innovations, while widely respected in Italy, have brought even more drama to the panettone debate. Like many modern sourdough bakers, he cherishes an “open crumb” with visible air pockets and strands of gluten that make his creations long and bulky. On social media, Mr. Shvartzapel’s alveoli have become a global topic of conversation.
Some bakers, such as Mr. Piffaretti, feel that this looser look makes his panettone fake; others believe it is a return to tradition.
Last year, Ms. Lazzaroni, the bread consultant, curated a museum exhibit on the evolution of Italian food from 1970 to 2050, including three panettone: one from industrial producer Alemagna, one made by Mr. Massari, and one from Mr. Shvartzapel.
“Panettone is a perfect example of how Italian taste is always traveling back and forth, getting infected and then reborn,” she said. “It would be wrong to see it as something that belongs only to us.”