Who owns panettone?
In the last decade, the Christmas classic has crossed Italian borders and gained a global profile. Now panettone is being transformed far from home, with new flavors like black sesame, the Aperol spritz and cacio e pepe. There are Japanese versions leavened with sake lees and Brazilian versions filled with dulce de leche; supermarket minis that cost 2 dollars and truffles that reach almost 200 dollars.
When the standard was established, probably in the 15th century in Milan, panettone was a domed sweet bread with a tender, bright golden crumb, perfumed and studded with sugared fruits. It belongs to the same festive tradition as German stollen, Polish chalka and British fruitcake: sweets made once a year with butter, eggs, refined flour and sugar, spices from Asia and preserved fruits from the Mediterranean.
When Italy was unified, panettone became a national Christmas symbol. But with the advent of commercial baking, the product inside the boxes became dry and flat-tasting, with cheaper ingredients like caramelized pumpkin and powdered milk.
The groundswell of appreciation for panettone is restoring interest in bread and fueling new conflicts among those who make it. Disputes have broken out between purists and ultrapurists, between traditionalists and modernists, and between Italy and the rest of the world.
Laura Lazzaroni, a journalist and bread consultant, said panettone is following the arc traced by pizza: A food not considered particularly interesting at home becomes popular abroad, is adopted by foreign artisans and then returns to great fanfare.
“We never fell out of love with pizza, but we didn’t think about it much,” he said. “Then people started coming home from the United States saying, ‘I had better pizza in California than in—insert the name of my city in Italy here—and we have to do something about it.’”
Now that panettone’s reputation has risen, so have the stakes for Italian bakers. Conpait, the pastry trade group, estimates that the market will total around $650 million in 2022, with 10 percent growth in “artigianale” products over “industriali” products.
The fight to control panettone has been going on for 20 years, ever since Italian exporters sounded the alarm that foreign-made versions were capturing the global market. In 2005, the Italian government passed laws dictating ingredients and decreed that “natural fermentation” is required to produce panettone labeled “Made in Italy.” But the code makes no distinctions between wild and cultured yeasts, between organic and bleached flour, between fruits caramelized with sugar and with glucose — distinctions that have become important to bakers and customers.
The best panettone combines the fluffiness of cotton candy, the creaminess of French toast, the smoothness of a fresh donut and the buttery softness of a sponge cake. Now modern bakers are trying to recapture those qualities, despite the notorious challenges of making panettone from scratch.
“It is the most difficult product to make,” said Giuseppe Piffaretti, who started the Coppa del Mondo del Panettone baking competition in 2019. “Panettone is not a recipe; It is a lifestyle”.
Iginio Massari, a nationally revered teacher in Brescia, said it takes 10 years to train an employee to brew it correctly.
Roy Shvartzapel, Massari’s American protégé, put it another way: “Panettone is the top of the mountain” of baking.
The American panettone revolution has so far been spearheaded by Shvartzapel, who opened an all-panettone bakery in San Francisco in 2015, to take panettone beyond Christmas, with fresh fruit and seasonal flavors.
Shvartzapel’s innovations, while widely respected in Italy, have brought even more drama to the panettone debate. Like many modern sourdough bakers, he favors an “open crumb” with visible air pockets and skeins of gluten that make his creations tall and voluminous.
Some bakers, like Piffaretti, feel that this looser appearance makes their panettone inauthentic; others believe it is a return to tradition.
“Panettone is a perfect example of how Italian taste always travels from one place to another, becomes contaminated and then is reborn,” Lazzaroni said. “It would be a mistake to see it as something that only belongs to us.”
By: JULIA MOSKIN
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6509170, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-12-27 21:40:07
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