MY LOVE STORY WITH PANETTONE

 

 

My love story with panettone began in New York. There, my pastry chef —an Italian— gave us panettones brought directly from Italy as a Christmas gift. I had never tasted anything like it before — pure delight!

 

Until that moment, I thought I didn’t like panettone. The only ones I knew were the industrial versions my grandmother bought at Christmas. And of course, I was never drawn to anything industrial. I had no idea what a well-made artisanal panettone was, nor the intricate process behind it.

 

My chef explained that it required three days of work, fermented with sourdough that had to be fed every three hours. I could hardly understand what that meant. Feed a dough every 3 hours? What was that? Believe me when I say it’s the hardest food process I’ve ever attempted — the Sistine Chapel of doughs. Without realizing it, in that moment he planted a seed in me — an obsession to learn how to master such an impressive and complex dough.

 

In 2011, while living in New York, I created my own sourdough starter in my bedroom, using buckwheat flour. When I returned to Spain, I brought it with me, and since then it has accompanied me every step of the way. We’ve been through everything together: it’s nearly “died” several times and once it was even thrown in the trash! Luckily, I recovered it thanks to a friend I had given a small piece to months earlier.

 

That same year, I spent six months training at Chocolate Academy. By “chance,” they were offering a course on panettone and holiday breads. I jumped right in. The recipe didn’t work for me at all, but along the way I was learning to care for my starter without a fermenter and with little experience. Everything happened: doughs that wouldn’t rise, others that collapsed, panettones that caved in after baking when hung upside down… a true nightmare! I even considered installing cameras just to monitor the fermentation so I wouldn’t have to sneak back into the bakery in the middle of the night.

 

After countless trials, mistakes, and tears, little by little I began to perfect the recipe. I became obsessed with comparing formulas, percentages, techniques. And when I finally started to master the process, I grew tired of always making the same thing: 70% chocolate and candied orange. I wanted to innovate. And of course, when I experimented… the failures returned.

 

People would often say to me: “Why try new things if the classic already works for you? Just leave it at that.” But every mistake taught me something new. I came to understand that working with sourdough is a living art: a community of bacteria and yeasts so sensitive that they can delay fermentation for hours or cause the dough to collapse entirely.

 

When I regained control of the process, I asked myself an essential question: what sense did it make to use butter while living in Tarragona and coming from Mallorca, surrounded by olive trees? After many trials (and frustrations), I finally found the answers I needed during a course and achieved what I was looking for: an olive oil margarine made with oil from my own trees. Thanks to it, the dough became softer, silkier, and often dairy-free. This meant that more people could enjoy the Roscottone.

 

And here’s the important part: in this course, I don’t just share my secrets — I also give you a piece of my sourdough starter, the very same one born in New York in 2011. It’s active and ready to adapt to your own bakery. I’ll show you how to play with ingredients and temperatures to make your work easier, and how to dare to create flavors that are entirely your own.

 

I hope you enjoy this journey as much as I have throughout all these years.

With all my heart, thank you.

 

Eva