‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The panettone were shaped on the counter with care,
In hopes that tomorrow they’d be light as air
Dear Penny was nestled all snug in her bed,
While visions of panettone danced in her head;
And Marko, fresh from a haircut, needing to cleanse his cap,
Had just hopped into the shower instead of having a nap
When out from the kitchen there arose such a clatter,
He sprang from the shower without rinsing his lather
Away to the kitchen he flew like a flash,
Penny tore open the panettone, Marko’s dreams up in ash.
He called the vet to ask what signs she might show
Gave the list of ingredients, how much she ate? “I don’t know.”
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature doodle, and an empty butter wrapper near,
With little old Penny, so lively and quick,
Marko hoped all night long that she wouldn’t be sick.
More defeated and scared about chocolate causing pain,
Marko whistled, and shouted, and called her by name
“PENNY WHY DID YOU EAT MY PANETTONE DOUGH!”
Growing up we had “Canadian Christmas” – the commercialized, Santa themed holiday on December 25; and “Serbian Christmas” on January 7, which my mom insisted was the real Christmas with Jesus. We are not religious as a family, so our traditions were more battles in personal identity – are we Canadian or Serbian? Being born in Canada, and only having ever lived in Canada, my sisters and I chose Canadian Christmas.
The traditional Serbian Christmas foods – according to Google, not my family – are things we ate in growing up: sarma (cabbage rolls), pecenica (roast pig), dates, poppyseed loaf, little walnut cakes, kiflice (like rugelach). We never had česnica, an enriched bread reserved for Christmas according to the internet. Kitchener, where I’m from, is a historically German immigrant city – so growing up the enriched Christmas bread we ate was stollen.
When my mom died 11 years ago, so too did our tradition of Serbian Christmas. She died in late November, which casts a long shadow through the holidays. In the first few years after she died I distracted myself with my own tradition: an endless amount of baking. I baked a Christmas cookie a day for 30 days, between her death day and Canadian Christmas. My favourite cookies are all over the map – Austrian linzer cookies, Scottish shortbread, Mexican alfajores, but the best Christmas cookies are Italian: anginetti, pignoli, walnut crescents, lemon cookies, florentines, pizelles. The work was cathartic.
They don’t make advice columns for families like mine. There is no travel – we live 10 minutes apart. There isn’t a Griswold Family Christmas with large groups of people who love and hate each other, stuck together for days – cooking, eating, and arguing with each other. Nobody’s boss gets kidnapped. It’s my dad, sisters, and nieces, together for a short meal in the 90-minutes we can find between my sister’s overtime shifts, before going our separate ways.
The holidays aren’t busy for me, instead it’s a quiet time – the texts, calls, and Instagram posts from friends are further apart. Work is closed. Shops are closed. Friends are traveling, visiting their family or tropical islands. I am at home, alone, which I’m okay with. Over the years I’ve created my own distractions – traditions – to keep me feeling good while I’m alone over the break.
I like observing everyone else’s food traditions. Christina has tree-trimming party, she and Paul spend days preparing the food for it. For those who can’t join, spiced candied pecans arrive by mail. Christina sends me the pecans for all the Canadians, so I must make a delivery to our mutual friends. Christina sees the value in using food to strengthen friendships.
My friend
celebrates Hanukkah by creating Chinese-restaurant themed re-writes of Christmas carols. Historically he posts these to Twitter on Christmas Day. This year his tradition has moved to Mastodon.Since her mom died, my friend Kelly makes her mom’s recipe for nuts and bolts. Her brother shows up at her door several times in December with empty tupperware, looking to fill his heart with memories. Kelly calls me to vent about this – she admits she actually loves it – and her calls inevitably lead to me asking for my own container of nuts and bolts. She obliges. Kelly and I decided that she will leave me the secret family recipe in her will. If she dies before her brother I can continue making the nuts and bolts, delivering them like the Ghost of Christmas Past.
I’m making new traditions with my new friends – I have been trading food and books with Anna and Dino. I’ve always wanted to do the Feast of the Seven Fishes, but I haven’t had fish-loving friends in Kitchener crazy enough to partake until now – Anna has promised we will do it next year. Marci, while editing this newsletter, has promised to help.
I’ve always wanted to have a holiday cookie party, but between startup burnout and pandemics it hasn’t come together. Without colleagues to feed, I’ve replaced the cookies with fewer, bigger projects.
During Christmas 2020 I documented the step-by-step process of making croissants on my Instagram Stories, which captured my friends' attention across the multi-day event. Many of my friends planned to come home for Christmas, but they couldn’t due to the COVID restrictions. They had FOMO, for the lost gatherings, but mostly for the croissants. They didn’t know I had a secret plan.
I had packed up the croissants they watched me make and shipped them via overnight FedEx, from Kitchener to Toronto, Ottawa, San Francisco, LA, and Florida. I sent the tracking details. I’ll always remember my friend Janice watching the shipment leave Kitchener at 6pm, get to Oakland at 8am – out for delivery – and her surprise and delight when croissants arrived at 10am. 18 hours earlier they came out of the oven.
Croissantmas was born.
Croissants take several days. I also make Claire Safftiz’s aged fruitcake, which takes two months. This year I wanted to make panettone, which takes a lifetime. Learning these new techniques takes my time, energy, and brain power, which is a great distraction when you’re alone in the winter. After the bake, someone has to eat this glorious food, so there is a built-in way to connect with friends.
Panettone is called the Mount Everest of Baking. I also took on dogsitting for my friend Larysa – watching Penny, a mini Golden Doodle, the Mount Everest of Dogs. Like panettone, Penny has opinions about how she should be treated and she will let them be known. Larysa’s children call Penny an old Italian grandmother. You can follow her on TikTok: EuropeanGrandmaDog. I was glad to have her Big Nonna Energy with me on this journey.
Penny-ttone week
Panettone is a traditional Italian Christmas bread (often called a cake, but it’s bread). Most European cultures have an enriched holiday bread, it seems to have started as a way to preserve eggs, butter, and fruit over the winter. Panettone, when sealed, can stay fresh until Easter when the chickens are back to a regular laying schedule. European countries have their own variations: France has Kugelhopf, Belgium has Cramique. Greece has Christopsomo. The Czech Repubic has Vánočka. Česnica. Stollen. Panettone.
I have a vivid memory of the first time I had panettone. In 2017, Longo’s, an Italian-leaning grocery store chain from Toronto (now owned by Sobeys), had just expanded to my region. I love a new grocery store: what weird, house-made products do they have? What’s the same white-label as everywhere else masquerading as unique? Is the hot deli good?
Longo’s had weird products, the best being a huge display of panettone and pandoro. The prices ranged from $5 to $125. The price point and packaging made me curious. I needed to know – could this really be worth $125?
I started in the middle-ground: I bought one for $45, chocolate. I brought it to the office, back when there was an office to take food to – another tradition lost – and I think it lasted 15 minutes. One of my colleagues called it “magic chocolate bread.” It was soft, airy, pulled apart like milk bread, with an aroma unlike anything I’ve smelled before.
I was hooked. I bought one to send to each of my clients that year.
Last year I tried to find good panettone in Kitchener – panettone artigianale – it translates literally to handcrafted, what we would call artisanal. I’m surprised Vincenzo’s in Waterloo doesn’t have more than the large commercial brands. These commercial Italian panettone brands, like the Canadian icon Tim Hortons*, are largely owned by Brazillian conglomerates profiting off a tradition while ignoring its roots. They pray at the church of profit margin with dough conditioners.
This year I broadened my search: I went to Montreal and I found panettone at Elena (excellent – great orange and chocolate flavour, wildly open texture) and Hof Kelsten (beautiful aroma, gentle taste, soft texture). In Toronto, I found it at Sud Forno (a beautifully intense aroma and sweetness, a silky texture closer to Japanese milk bread) – and I saw that Bà Nội and Mattachioni are making panettone but did not try those. Locally, even Golden Hearth Bakery had panettone, though theirs is really a large hot crossed bun that I quickly gave to my neighbour Barb. I needed room for better panettone, and for Barb to give me honey (I ran out) to make my own. The New York Times told me “panettone isn’t a recipe; it’s a lifestyle.” I would like that on a t-shirt.
I brought the panettone I found in Montreal and Toronto back for Anna and Dino to try with me. We shared our reviews. They joined my obsession. Anna found the crown jewel of our panettone journey at Pearl Morissette in Niagara. Pearl Morissette had La Fralanghina Ristorante in Bonea, Benevento – near Mount Vesuvius – bake panettone specially for them, to exclusively import to Canada.
The panettone were for retail sales, but Melissa at Pearl Morissette, hearing my story, shipped two to me (one for me, one for Anna). Melissa could only commit to post-Christmas delivery. This turned into a Festivus Miracle: the panettone was delivered during the so-called “storm of a generation” and arrived on December 23.
Where I thought Elena’s panettone had exceeded my expectations, Pearl Morissette’s panettone is in another universe entirely. Italian’s tend to describe the aroma of a food, a word Canadians and Americans reserve for aromatherapy or sarcastically to imply lack of deodorant. But I think the Italians have it right, it’s more than just a smell. When I opened this panettone it was intoxicating, like the angels descended from heaven itself. Softly sweet and complex, like caramel made from honey and apricots. Gentle, filling your senses completely, lingering like the many goodbyes said to guests you love on the way out the door.
It was wonderful to have a real Italian artisan panettone. I haven’t been to Italy yet, so I wanted to know how it compared to the Canadians and what to strive for in my own attempt to climb Everest.
I also picked up a copy of Panettone & Sourdough Vienoiserrie by Thomas Teffri-Chambelland. Thomas scientifically evaluated hundreds of years of traditions to see what, if anything, the traditional techniques do to the bacteria and yeast that make bread rise. It turns out quite a lot.
Where cooking is art, baking is science, bread is math and chemistry masquerading as tradition.
Making lievito madre
The first step on my journey was converting my sourdough starter from what bread bakers call levain, a liquid sourdough starter to lievito madre, mother yeast – also known as pasta madre, mother dough. Levain typically has an equal amount of flour and water (100% hydration, like pancake batter) and is stirred until combined. Levain is fluid and allowed to expand freely in a jar. Sometimes it explodes out of said jar.
Lievito madre is 42–48% hydration, similar in texture to pasta dough. The flour, water, and starter aren’t stirred – it is kneaded for 10 minutes, like pasta dough, until smooth to build dough strength. The dough is fed 3 times a day. The dough takes baths. The dough is precious, like Penny.
Also like Penny, this mother dough took me a few days to really figure out. Initially I wasn’t kneading the dough enough (or walking Penny enough) and my hydration was too high (as was hers). The dough was a hard to manage mess that looked nothing like what I’ve seen on Instagram from the panettone people I’ve admired for years.
Once the starter is converted there are two painful tasks to manage: your mother’s ability to multiply and her sour disposition increasing as she does so. For bread, the acidity of sourdough is a virtue. For dessert, acidity must be managed. Most panettone artisans do this measuring and managing pH levels. I did not invest in a pH meter. I have one on order, an act of penitence for my panettone sins.
To manage acidity you feed the starter as follows:
In the morning, you give your mother a bath in warm water with 5% sugar – the sugar helps shape the type of yeast and bacteria forming to be osmotolerant, meaning resistant to osmosis, so they can withstand higher sugar levels in dough. The water helps leach the acetic and lactic acids created by the sourdough bacteria out of the dough, increasing pH and decreasing sourness.
After her bath you feed your mother breakfast: 100g of flour, 100g mature mother, 45g water. You knead this for 10 minutes and form it into a tight ball. Make the sign of the cross with a blade, which is not of religious significance but does help the dough expand. Proof at 28°C for 4 hours or until tripled in size.
Mother needs to be fed lunch: the same process from breakfast is repeated, though you need to remove the dry skin that forms on the outer layer. Mother likes exfoliation.
Mother needs to be fed dinner and nestled snug in her bed. The ratios are the same as breakfast, but after kneading you roll the dough out. After a few days of this I started using my pasta machine. You fold the dough over, roll it out, and repeat – laminating the dough to build strength. On the final roll, the dough is then tightly wound into a spiral, wrapped in cloth and tied up like Sandy Claus to constrict its growth overnight. This creates anaerobic compression, meaning the oxygen is constricted which forces specific types of yeast and bacteria to thrive. The overnight rise happens at room temperature, ideally 18°C, where mother should triple in size over 12-16 hours.
Mother knows best. Mental note: Penny and I should watch Tangled.
Before making panettone you must complete this process every day for 5 days, or as long as it takes for your mother to triple in size within the breakfast or lunch feeding. Penny and I used this opportunity for another tradition: holiday movies.
She seemed to like the old movies best – The Shop Around The Corner, It’s A Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street (the original), White Christmas, and Meet Me in St. Louis. While not really a Christmas movie, Penny really enjoyed The Sound of Music, I think because How do you solve a problem like Maria? is really about her.
Between managing mother and walking Penny, I did not have much time to sit down. Penny became jealous of my time at the counter and would demand I play with her. I distracted her with Elf, Love Actually, The Santa Clause.
Panettone and Panettone Accessories
Many of the ingredients in traditional panettone are very difficult to find in Kitchener, such as orange paste and candied citron. There’s a specific vanilla and herb extraction called Fior di Sicilia which is sometimes used for aroma and one Italian textbook translated as “the aroma of pagans”
I set out to make my own pagans.
The orange paste was easy enough, as I made it before for orange brioche. You slice oranges in half leaving the peel intact, removing the seeds. Boil for 1-2 hours, changing the water at least once. This removes the bitterness from the pith. Drain then weigh your oranges, add 40% that weight in sugar. Simmer for 10-15 minutes and puree in a blender. Orange paste can be added to any bread recipe and it will add a beautiful, gentle orange aroma you can’t find any other way. Add some (40g per 1kg flour) to your next batch of cinnamon buns to change your life. You can also spread it on toast, which I did with the leftovers.
Candied citron is another story. Encouraging my insanity, Anna got me a Buddha’s Hand – a type of citron with no flesh, only peel, which makes it perfect for candying. It smells like no other citrus, it’s not a lemon or an orange, it’s it’s own beautiful magical thing. I wanted to bathe in its smell forever.
There is a traditional French technique to candy citrus: you bring a simple syrup solution to boil, pour it over citrus – the citrus never goes on the heat. You allow the syrup to cool to room temperature, strain off the syrup, reboil it, and “repeat as many times as necessary” until you’ve achieved your desired level of candied-ness (measured on the Brix scale, something I don’t know how to measure at home). This was entertaining the first boil, strange the second, and exhausting 12 hours later when I was still candying citrus peel. Across 2 days of this work, Penny and I watched all of the Harry Potter movies.
I was worried that it would be too bitter. I missed the instructions on boiling the peel – which I clearly know the importance of doing since I made a video on it. The friends I gave samples to raved about it. Traditions, even when painfully tedious, are worth keeping.
Making the first dough
Panettone is a difficult bread because it uses two doughs. Other breads, like ciabatta and baguette, use a pre-ferment like biga or poolish – aged dough that adds a depth of flavour. Those pre-ferments are generally simple: flour, water, and yeast. Here there is a pre-ferment (mother), a complete dough with the bulk of the flour, and then it is enriched with a second complete dough. The sugar changes how the sourdough behaves by creating osmotic stress, like visiting family over the holidays – so it needs to be added in two separate visits to the mixer, over 2 days.
This textbook is made for bakeries, not home cooks. When I looked at the recipe, it started with 1000g of flour. This felt achievable, since that’s what I use when I make bread. But flour isn’t the main ingredient: there was almost 700g of egg yolks (37 egg yolks!), over 600g of butter (5 sticks), over 600g of candied orange, over 600g of raisins soaked in 150g of water. And water! Sugar! Honey! Salt! In total the recipe makes nearly 6kg (12lbs for Americans). The size of a baby Jesus.
I started the first dough thinking that my mixer, a Breville Bakery Chef, could handle the full recipe. It became very clear it could not and I divided the first dough into two batches. This also meant I could make one batch traditional with raisins, and the other with chocolate.
The first dough is mixed for an hour, with clear time markers – 20 minutes of mixing the flour, mother, and water. 20 minutes of adding in the egg yolks, 1/3 at a time. It ends with the butter. The science of this is explained in depth in the book, but the short version is that fat inhibits gluten formation. If you have not reached the windowpane stage before you add the butter, you likely never will. Because the dough has so much fat and sugar, like me at the holidays, it must be fully developed before the butter gets added.
Since I had to do two batches, by the second hour of mixing Penny began to glare at me. The mixer was interrupting her holiday movie marathon. “Burgermeister Meisterburger, take care of a baby? Outrageous!”
The first batch of dough sat at room temperature, 18°C in my drafty old house while the other batch mixed. This was a mistake. In bakeries, Desired Dough Temperature, or DDT, is precisely calculated as it impacts proofing time so much. The DDT was 26°C, my actual dough was 19°C after sitting around.
The dough needed to proof overnight at 28°C, and should have tripled in size within 12 hours. Mine took 24 hours to triple, I think because my dough was so cold initially.
"We had one dough, yes. What about second dough?”
Watching The Lord of The Rings is also a holiday tradition. I’m not sure why. Like Harry Potter, they are Christmas movies. It is tradition.
I had planned to make the second dough at 9am and bake the panettone by 6pm. The dough had other plans and didn’t triple until 10pm – over 12 hours late. I had a haircut in the middle of this and worried the dough would overproof while I was gone. It did not.
The second dough contains the first dough, more flour, more sugar, more egg yolk, honey, more butter, orange paste, salt, raisins, and candied citrus (in that order). It’s mixed in stages across 55 minutes – and you must get to windowpane before adding the butter.
After mixing, the dough rests for 45 minutes. Then you butter your counter – yes, you butter your counter – and pour the dough out. Panettone is baked in paper molds to help maintain its shape as it rises. My first order of molds never showed up, the second order arrived with hours to spare. You divide the dough based on your mold size, in my case 12 dough balls at 450g (1lb) each. You roughly shape the dough into a ball, then it has a 20-minute bench rest – letting it sit on the counter for the gluten to relax – followed by final shaping and moving into its molds.
The first batch of the recipe went fine. By the time I got to the second batch it was nearing 1am. I was tired and still hadn’t washed off the clippings from my haircut. I thought, as a fool who lives without pets or children, that I could run upstairs and quickly rinse my hair while the dough rested. Penny was sleeping on the couch, there was no need to disturb her.
You know that feeling when the house is suddenly too quiet. Like someone is up to something. It was extra quiet because Penny, as she leapt onto the counter to eat raw panettone dough with chocolate chips, stepped on the remote and paused Muppets Christmas Carol.
I ran downstairs and she had taken a chunk out of two chocolate panettone.
Given the hour I called Christina – who is in San Francisco and was still awake – in a panic. Then I called the 24 hour vet who thought the recipe sounded delicious and at worst Penny would have some diarrhea the next day. The next day I reported to Larysa that Penny’s poops were normal. I was told I am officially a parent now. It happens not with children, but with the discussion of someone else’s bowel movements.
After my panic I threw out the two damaged panettone, shaped the last four, and put them into the oven to keep warm overnight. The dough was supposed to proof at 28°C for 7 hours until tripled in size. Given my experience with the first dough I expected this to take a long time.
Baking and cooling
The dough didn’t rise at all overnight. I kept trying to usher it along, but it was sluggish. After 18 hours it had doubled in size and stopped. Should I leave it or bake it? I left it, a big mistake.
During this time I decided I might as well make an almond glaze – another new technique (a keeper). Before baking, panettone can be glazed and topped with nuts and pearl sugar; or scored and topped with butter.
I put the dough into a 325°F convection oven where it baked, taking twice as long as it should to reach an internal temperature of 200°F. It did not rise, but perhaps it would still taste good?
After baking, panettone is very delicate – when made correctly it should double in size in the oven – so lofty, like my ambitions for this recipe, it’s prone to collapse. To prevent this, metal skewers are immediately pushed through the base of the mold and the panettone is hung upside down to cool. As panettone cools the bread firms up and is returned to its upright state. This is a similar technique to one used in angel food cake.
Mine, having no oven spring, probably didn’t need to be flipped. But tradition must be followed.
The raisin panettone with almond glaze was fine. The glaze helped firm it to the mold.
The chocolate panettone was not meant to be and two immediately fell out of the mold. Between Penny and my mistakes I am already down 4 panettone.
Panettone should cool completely overnight, at least 8 hours, before flipping right-side-up and packaging. Both the bread and cellophane wrappers are typically sprayed with alcohol, like grappa, for aroma and preventing surface mold. Due to the magic of sourdough it can, allegedly, last through to Easter – but I doubt it will last a day in anyone’s house. Should you have leftovers it makes excellent French toast, but the Italians (according to Pearl Morissette) cut off a slice every morning to eat with coffee.
Unfortunately my panettone didn’t last a day – not because it was good, but because it was awful. Due to the very long fermentation, 4 days total instead of 2, my panettone became very acidic and sour. The texture was wrong, the taste was wrong. The citron was still great. I have a footnote on my assumptions for the technical issues if you are curious.
This is the big risk in project baking, or making your own holiday traditions, that makes it scary: it’s time consuming, it’s expensive, the techniques are not easily explained in writing – you have to feel them out. That’s pretty hard when it’s something you’ve never done before. Tolstoy wrote “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The panettone book is like a Hallmark movie, the story of bread when it works. But my panettone is like my weird family dynamic: without a podcast or New York Times article to help me, I need to help myself.
If I ever write a book on bread, it will be focused on how to know what you’ve done wrong and how to fix it.
I’m okay with the failure – sad about the wasted ingredients – but I am going to try panettone again soon. In a smaller batch that will make 1kg of dough instead of 6kg. I need to climb this mountain. I think it will be easier alone – without managing Penny, my jobby job, and a winter storm at the same time. Without the pressures of Christmas – Panettone: With a Vengeance.
The quiet time is here for me.
Merry Christmas,
Marko
Footnote 1 – Brazilian congolomerates:
I despise the insistence that drinking Tim Horton’s makes you Canadian. It’s brandwashing. Once, conservative politicians made fun of Justin Trudeau for buying donuts from a local donut shop instead of Tim’s. Tim’s pays workers minimum wage to increase their margin, the profits go to Brazilian billionaires. Local donut shops create local jobs and the money stays in Canada.
Footnote 2 – on troubleshooting my panettone:
These are my best guesses at what I did wrong. If you’ve made panettone before and have advice, please comment or send me a note!
I didn’t have a pH meter, so I wasn’t sure what the acidity was at any point – so this could have been doomed from the start (the recipes indicate pH ranges for each stage). No one can help me without this information.
My mixer couldn’t handle the whole dough volume (I should have shrunk the recipe, but I didn’t want to mess up the math). This ended up causing the dough to be much colder than it should have been. You’ll see in the section on feeding the lievito madre that the dough will triple in 4 hours at 28°C or 12 hours at 18°C. Because my dough was cold, and such a large mass to warm up, this slowed down fermentation. The longer fermentation goes on the more lactic acid (good sour, like yogurt) and acetic acid (bad sour, like acetone) builds up. Acetic acid bacteria prefer cooler temperatures.
I soaked my raisins in cognac I had leftover from fruitcake. This wasn’t in the recipe, it said water. But I thought I knew better than the recipe. Again, this might seem minor, but there was 170g of cognac added, as well as 30g of my home-made vanilla extract (which is bourbon). The recipe also said to drain any excess water, but this is flavour! It’s also 15% of the flour weight. As yeast matures it also creates alcohol as a byproduct. Yeast begins a mass die-off at 10-15% concentration of alcohol.
My final proofing temperature was incredibly inconsistent. The dough again sat at room temperature for hours while I panic-called Christina and the vet. For the first dough I could fit it all within my steam oven, which kept it at 28°C and could run for 12 hours at a time. For the shaped dough, I couldn’t fit all 12 in the steam oven, so I opted to use my normal oven. While this oven has a proofing mode it only works in 45 minute increments. Obviously at 1am I couldn’t keep resetting the timer. So I think it ranged up-and-down from 32°c to 18°C. One of the panettone had all the butter melt out of it, I think it was near where the steam gets injected into the oven.