My Panettone making journey was long and hard. Ten years ago I attempted to make my very first one and it turned out to be just a cake with some Panettone flavor. Fast forward 8 years and I started to take it more seriously. There are very good reasons why they call it the Mount Everest of baking. It’s delicate, tricky and requires mounds of patience, persistence and dedication to put together.

It all starts with a mix of fresh and high quality citrus fruits. The amount of manual labor that goes into a clean separation of the peel from the fruit in order to make candied fruit peel is intense. You then have to proceed with candying it in its own juice and some sugar, which typically takes anywhere from 20 minutes to half an hour on a low simmer over the stove. Then the jammy mixture needs to be cooled down and refrigerated.

Classic Panettone is made with an ultra stiff sourdough starter called Pasta Madre. Purists and professionals will tell you that you can’t make a real Panettone without Pasta Madre, which requires extremely hectic daily feedings for at least two weeks before you start using it for baking. For realistic reasons that would fit my busy lifestyle, I had to find a way to do it with my regular semi-liquid sourdough starter, which I use to make my weekly loaf of bread. Experimentation cost me an arm and a leg but in the end I pulled it off and got the seal of approval from my mentor and sourdough god; Diver Baker (as he wishes to be named in order to conceal his identity on social media). That day was the biggest milestone in my journey.

I continued to tweak the recipe until I managed to produce something that I too was happy with. The final product was then sent to my very dear Italian friend and social media sensation; Nathalie Azar from “Chit Chat with Nat”. Nathalie and her Italian mom were blown away by it and after posting a simple story about it on Instagram, paid orders were lined up in my inbox!

The quality of the ingredients that go into making Panettone is also something that is not to be taken lightly. Everything has to be top notch in order to make the three full days of work worth the effort.

Of course I had to lean into my dark esthetic and added some activated charcoal powder in my Panettone, so that I can call it original and my own! 🖤 For the social media recipe video, I wanted to create a somewhat surreal mood to match the Black Panettone. I remembered when my best friend, may his soul rest in peace, once introducing me to the song and music video of “Emperor’s New Clothes” by rock band: ‘Panic! At The Disco’. He also told me the Chinese moral story of what the Emperor’s New Clothes is referring to and my mind was royally blown. That song immediately became one of my all-time favorites and it strongly influenced many aspects of my video for this recipe.

I also put some of my visual effects knowledge into the video, by placing myself in my childhood (and adulthood) dream home. The Baron Empain palace was where I was hoping to live one day when I was a kid from the gothic 90’s era. I tried to achieve the effect of placing myself in the palace and zooming out from a window to reveal it by using so many AI apps and when they all failed, I did it manually with a lot of old-school digital editing techniques.

This Christmas I can proudly and confidently say that I made some amazing sourdough Panettone from scratch.

Thank you all for your continued support, always and I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a happy new year! 🎄🎇