Get Roy Schvartzapel's recipe: Open Crumb Panettone

This cavernous, tangy chocolate chip panettone pays homage to Roy Schvartzapel's famous open crumb delights.

Panettone is a sweet, rich, tangy Italian bread traditionally consumed on Christmas. It straddles the categories of bread and pastry, combining sourdough starter with butter, egg yolk, honey, vanilla, orange paste, and fillings such as candied fruit, chocolate chips, and nuts. Not to be confused with the gross syrupy industrial scale knockoff panetonnes that have hijacked the baked goods market; authentic panettone tastes like edible gold spun on a loom.

While the first traces of Italian panettone seem to appear in the Middle Ages, the product at that time was nothing like the one we make today, since the production of wheat has changed so drastically.

Panettone is widely recognized by professional cooks to be the hardest of all breads to bake. Some have called the process

“a house of cards.”

To get the best result, you must first feed your sourdough starter until it reaches maturity — a process which can take ten or more days. This is because the flavor of a quality panettone requires the cultivation of wild yeast (forbidding use of commercial yeast). Using wild yeast provides improved depth of flavor, a more supple, moist texture, and an extended period of shelf-life, or freshness. The baking process also requires you to sustain a healthy pH (acidity) and temperature of your dough throughout the three day affair.

The Milanese progenitors of traditional panettone passed down the bread starter they used to their descendants. They call it lievito madre, Italian for “mother yeast.” The lievito madre is about 80 years old.

Similar legends of centenarian and near-centenarian bread starters exist, such as this one from the Sonoma Index Tribune in 2020, whose owner dubbed his starter “better than sex”:

Steve Kyle has babies all across the globe. He really doesn’t know how many he has out there, he’s lost track. It’s likely his babies have had babies, and those babies have had babies.

“I’m immortal,” he said with a chuckle and grin.

Kyle, 77, is younger than his original “baby,” a sourdough starter he believes is probably 80 years old, perhaps older.

No one is more singularly responsible for the renaissance of top quality panetonne in the U.S. than Roy Schvartzapel. Roy is the man behind From Roy, a mail-order panettone business that many consider to be the best tasting non-Italian rendition of the bread.

Roy Schvartzapel’s panettones are characterized by their high rise and voluminous anatomy, where a cavernous crumb is revealed upon bisecting the cake with a knife. This alveolate crumb is what sets Roy’s panettones apart from Italian tradition, and allows for a lighter, melt-in-your-mouth sensation remniscent of the oral dynamics of cotton candy. His panetonne comes out of the oven looking as if it were

“stretched by the hand of God.”

Food podcaster Dave Chang calls it a

“full-frontal assault on your willpower.”

Roy earned his panettone chops from the best; an apprenticeship under Italian master Iginio Massari. Since then, he has spent two decades honing his craft. This recipe, documented by yours truly, is a lightly adapted version suitable for the home baker.