A Philly pastry chef makes holiday panettone a labor of love

Panettone: For some, it draws a blank, and for others, it elicits a groan. The classic Italian holiday baked good is often associated with another seasonal cousin — fruitcake — that virtually no one wants a slice of.

Pastry chef Danielle Seipp knows this. “It gets a bad rap,” she says of the fruit-studded sweet bread. “It’s the thing you think about that no one wants at Christmastime.”

But Seipp also knows the other side to panettone. “When it’s done properly, it’s the most beautiful, light, and airy thing,” she says in the basement kitchen of Four Seasons Philadelphia, where she is executive pastry chef, overseeing the sweet things that emerge at both Vernick Coffee Bar and Jean-Georges Philadelphia. Behind her, several panettone are cooling upside down in midair, secured by dowels attached to twine that’s tied onto a bakery rack.

The tall loaves are laced with vanilla bean, dark Valrhona chocolate, and candied lemon and orange peel from Italy’s Agrimontana. Each weighs a kilogram and takes 36 hours to prepare from start to finish. They’re destined for Vernick Coffee Bar, which will have about 50 to sell to customers this year at $80 apiece.

Seipp learned to make panettone from two of the best in the business, Marc Vetri and Jeff Michaud, whom she worked with as pastry chef at Osteria in 2014 and later, as executive pastry chef of all Vetri Family restaurants.

That was the beginning of her enthusiasm, but it has gone well beyond. She’s been baking panettone every holiday season for 10 years, during which she’s nursed the same starter (affectionately named Latoya) for the yeasted, enriched bread. Early on in the annual tradition, someone took a photo of Seipp surrounded by the domed loaves. She put that photo on a couple hoodies that she was giving to friends. She’s recreated the snapshot over and over again, always wearing the previous year’s sweatshirt to commemorate panettoni past.

What is it about panettone? It ultimately comes down to the intensity. “You have to stay really late to mix it, you come in godawful early — I was here at 4 a.m. this morning to mix the next dough and I’ll be here probably until like 7 o’clock tonight to mix the sponge for tomorrow’s dough.”

Besides the long hours, panettone is unforgiving, requiring bakers to tune into their environment. “If the dough’s too hot when you mix it, it could break. If it’s not rising in the proper time period, you’re not going to get that same oven spring,” Seipp says. “Bread in general is different from day to day, depending on weather and all those sorts of things. This is an amplified version of that.”

This is the first year that Seipp’s entire pastry crew helped make the panettoni, prepared in almost 30-pound batches. They’ve been practicing the recipe since September, when they started feeding the bread’s starter, which they keep a close eye on. The starter needs to be very active as it forms the backbone of the bread and needs to withstand “an unfathomable amount of yolks and butter and all these things that would make gluten not want to form,” Seipp says.

Once the starter has reached its peak activity level, Seipp and company mix a sponge — a combination of the starter plus flour, water, eggs, and butter. It’s another stage that ensures the dough can hold up to the rest of the ingredients to come. The sponge renders a dough so elastic, it pulls like taffy. “You can literally grab it and you can just keep walking.”

After the sponge has tripled in size, in goes more butter, eggs, sugar, vanilla, chocolate, and citrus peel. The dough relaxes and ferments, then gets shaped and placed in its signature tall, circular paper mold. When it’s near tripled in size a second time, the top gets glazed with egg whites, cornstarch, almonds, and pearl sugar. It rises just a bit more before it’s finally baked, then cooled for at least six hours.

Cooling the panettone upside down is one more key to its gravity-defying structure. “If it were to sit upright,” Seipp explains, “the crumb structure inside is so soft that it would collapse on itself and become like a big pancake.”

At the end of this labor of love, bakers are rewarded with bread that’s crunchy on the top and cotton candy-soft on the inside, perfumed with citrus and vanilla, filled with pockets of dark chocolate. “It’s sweet and you get that sourness from the long fermentation. It’s all these fantastic ingredients highlighted in this beautiful bread.”

Seipp recommends pairing it with coffee or zabaione. She suggests wrapping it between slices to preserve it. But there’s a perfect way to remedy stale panettone: “It makes a great French toast or bread pudding.”

Danielle Seipp’s panettone will be available for pickup at Vernick Coffee Bar, 1800 Arch St., Dec. 20-23. Reserve one at exploretock.com/vernickcoffeebar.