Sidework

Jim Lahey, founder and owner of Sullivan Street Bakery, has opinions about panettone. One is that “making panettone is not terribly convenient.” I visited Jim at his Hell’s Kitchen bakery, hoping to better understand why panettone— the brioche-like Italian bread commonly eaten during the Christmas holiday period, recognizable for its distinctive cupola shape and candied fruit flavors—has become a very big deal among bake-fluencers.

I didn’t really find an answer, but no matter. Jim’s historical digressions were worth the price of entry: he told me about the 1990s Upper East Side bread scene centered around Ecce Panis, which sold boutique breads behind actual velvet ropes (see NY Mag timeline, 1989), the dough-like rise and fall of Greenberg Desserts (inspiration for the black-and-white cookie in Seinfeld episode #77), how the Romans copied everything from the Greeks (see: H.E. Jacob, Six Thousand Years of Bread), why Frederick Douglass is one of our most important political philosophers (and may be the namesake of an upcoming Lahey project), and touched on Nina Simone and Nick Cave and universal human suffrage too. You know, just the usual bakery kaffeeklatsch.

Jim’s been making panettone since 1995 (soon after he opened Sullivan Street with help from the legendary restaurateur Joe Allen) and these days makes about 600-700 of them a year. This year, it could be fewer. Panettone is nuanced enough that a baker of Jim’s talent, working with a team that probably hasn’t flubbed a batch of pizza bianca in decades, sometimes just strikes out. But when they do, they know why.

The three-day process starts by building a healthy, stiff pasta madre (already sounds like a neo-Western written by Elizabeth Gilbert), followed by the nurturing of the primo impasto and secondo impasto (overtones of papal conclave). The resulting dough is precisely scaled, blessed with the chosen inclusions (candied fruit, chocolate, nuts, etc.), meticulously proofed and scored and then baked at a low temperature particular to panettone.

Panettone is pulled from the oven with its center just barely done: the baker is aiming for enough carry-over cooking for the loaves to finish on their own, while avoiding the dreaded “key-holing” that can happen with enriched breads. The still jiggly loaves are then skewered at their base, flipped over, and left to hang upside-down for about four hours, the image of which brings to mind a colony of fat, delicious bats. This hang time allows the loaves to firm upas they cool, retaining their loft and assuring the integrity of those golden-brown domes.

What can go wrong is a lot, but most often comes down to the pasta madre—a high-maintenance madam that requires 60-66F at many times of day and 82-86F at a few. Or it can happen with either one of the impastos, if they unexpectedly sour or suffer a gluten breakdown—failures of time, temperature, over-mixing, and who knows what else. These perils face the baker before loaves are even in the oven.

Panettone not a forgiving loaf, compared with Jim’s celebrated, intuitive, and highly forgiving no-knead bread recipe. Every year, working without specialized equipment or a co-packer, he has to figure it out anew to some extent—experiment, fail, succeed, and then park it again until next fall. The precision and control that go into making panettone suggest why it flourished commercially first (the big Italian brands with high-tech, automated baking equipment and dedicated facilities), and more recently on social media (where virtuosity of all kinds is now possible, celebrated, and rewarded).

Ultimately, Jim says he makes panettone because it’s “a really beautiful bread to bake.” He’s not in it for the likes.

[Sullivan Street Bakery’s Panettone is available for pre-order on their website.]