The typical Christmas desserts: panettone and pandoro
By: Martina Celegato
Submitted: 2009-10-02 09:22:40 | Word Count: 559
With the approaching of Christmas, among friends and relatives several discussions arouse between those who prefer the pandoro and who the panettone, two typical desserts of Italian feasts but not only.
Which is better or tastier is hard to say, it depends on taste, but certainly they are the best sellers. Surely this supposed rivalry also allows pastry shop to increase sales, because in every family there are both the supporters of one and of the other. And this is not happening at Easter, where the typical dessert is the Colomba.
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The origin of pandoro has not yet been established with certainty, the versions are still contrasting. Some scholars think that the pandoro was born in the Venetian Republic in the '500, when they were served on the rich tables of nobles some sweet of conical shape, covered with gold leaf, called "Pan de Oro”.
For others, however, the origin comes from an old star-shaped dessert that the Veronese consumed at Christmas: the "Nadalin". The most accepted theory, however, links the birth of pandoro to the Royal House of Habsburg, where since '700-'800 processing techniques of the "Vienna bread" were well known and remained the basis for the preparation of pandoro. The processing of the "Bread of Vienna" planned to finish the dough by adding a greater amount of butter with the system of puff pastry, where several layers of pasta are alternating with layers of butter, with the result that during the baking process the cake volume increases.
The production of the pandoro has perfected in Verona at the end of '800. The pandoro has been the most typical expression of confectionery production of Verona and is now famous throughout Italy as one of the traditional desserts of the holiday season. As the ancient "Nadalin", the pandoro is still star-shaped. It has the structure of a truncated cone, with large spines arranged in the typical design of an eight-pointed star.
Even the legends on the panettone invention are numerous, we know for sure that is a cake created in Milan. While the Lombardy panettone is known to be high, there is also a variant of Piedmont, low and wide. One of the most famous legends is that of Ughetto and Adalgisa. The family of Ughetto falconer of the Duke, contrasted the love-story of the beautiful young man with Adalgisa, the daughter of a baker.
When the girl's father began to have financial trouble due to the loss of customers and the illness of his boy, Adalgisa was forced to do menial jobs to provide some money to the family.
The situation was painful for the young Ughetto and that was when he hit upon the idea of working as an apprentice in the baker shop. During the period of work Ughetto made some changes to the bread, adding butter first and then sugar to the original recipe. One night there Ughetto also added bits of candied citron and eggs. That was a very special bread and pleased everyone.
For Christmas the young boy decided to add some raisins. It was a triumph, everyone wanted the new bread invented by Ughetto.
