[bold]Who Controls Panettone? The Gold Rush Is On.
The Christmas treat that one chef calls “the mountaintop” of baking has become a global moneymaker, inspiring laws, contests and a fervid debate over how to make it.[/bold]
Julia Moskin
By Julia Moskin
Dec. 19, 2022
Who owns panettone?
In the last decade, the Christmas classic has burst its Italian borders and gained a global profile. Like Basque burnt cheesecake and French croissants, panettone is being tested and transformed far from home, with new flavors like black sesame, Aperol spritz and cacio e pepe. There are Japanese versions leavened with sake lees and Brazilian ones stuffed with dulce de leche; supermarket minis that cost $2 and truffled ones that fetch nearly $200.
When the standard was set, most likely in 15th-century Milan, panettone was a domed sweet bread with a tender, bright-golden crumb, scented and studded with sugared fruit. It belongs to the same luxurious holiday tradition as German stollen, Polish chalka and British fruitcake: treats made once a year from expensive stores of butter and eggs, refined flour and sugar, spices from Asia and preserved fruit from the Mediterranean. Bits of chocolate were added later, and regional ingredients like lemon on the Amalfi coast and hazelnuts in Piedmont.
As Italy unified, panettone became a national symbol of Christmas; extravagantly wrapped and ribboned loaves became status symbols and popular gifts. But with the advent of commercial baking, the product inside the boxes became increasingly dry and flat-tasting, with cheaper ingredients like candied squash and milk powder.
The surge of appreciation for panettone is both restoring interest in the bread and fomenting 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. The battles have played out in trade unions, legislatures and online, where a passionate worldwide community of sourdough bakers weighs in on matters like hydration, acidulation and almonds vs. hazelnuts.
Laura Lazzaroni, a journalist and bread consultant, said panettone is following the arc traced by pizza: A food not considered particularly interesting at home catches on abroad, is adopted by foreign artisans, then returns to great fanfare.
“We never fell out of love with pizza, but we didn’t think about it very much,” she said. “Then people started coming home from America saying, ‘I had better pizza in California than in — insert name of my town 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, who are jockeying not only for ownership of that tradition, but also for market share. Conpait, the pastry trade group, estimates that market will be about $650 million this year, with 10 percent growth of “artigianale” over “industriali” products. Best-of lists, awards and contests like the new Coppa del Mondo del Panettone have proliferated.
“This is a world championship, not a church bake sale,” said Giuseppe Piffaretti, who started the Coppa del Mondo in 2019.
The struggle to control panettone has been raging for 20 years, since Italian exporters sounded alarms that foreign-made versions were capturing the global market.
Panettone has long been popular in Argentina, Peru and Brazil, where Italian food arrived along with immigrant populations in the late 19th century. Many of the panettone sold in U.S. supermarkets are made in South America, especially by the giants Bauducco and D’Onofrio.
Unlike tomatoes from San Marzano or mortadella from Bologna, panettone from Milan isn’t a protected regional specialty under the European Union’s labeling system. Luigi Biasetto, a top baker in Padua, is leading an effort to have panettone declared part of the world’s “intangible cultural heritage” by UNESCO, as Neapolitan pizza was in 2017.