Milan was once the center of panettone baking, but the Fiasconaro bakery in the Sicilian medieval village of Castelbuono has become famous for its take on the fruit-studded holiday sweet bread
Nicola Fiasconaro pulls a floppy mass of panettone dough off of a conveyor belt, plops it onto a steel work table, and shapes the buttery, fruit-studded goop into a perfect little round. The legendary pastry chef makes it look easy, despite the dough’s reputation as impossible.
The factory sits on top of the hill above the center of Castelbuono, a cobblestoned 14th-century village in the middle of Sicily’s mountainous Madonie National Park. Tourists come to see the park and Castelbuono Castle, but the bakery is a destination as well. Everywhere around the town, the smell of sugar follows you.
Of the village’s 9,000 residents, 180 people work at the factory, meaning the bakery employs about 2 percent of all locals. Together, they produce over a dozen varieties of panettone in several different sizes, selling Fiasconaro’s Sicilian panettoni to 60 countries. “Every step is handmade from the beginning to the final product to the end of the development,” Agata Fiasconaro says. “Every year, we produce more panettone because we export all over the world. We add ovens, mixers, and people. Behind our product, there are people.” Castelbuono residents work in the mixing room, the upstairs cooling room where finished panettoni hang upside down by the hundreds like plump bats, and downstairs in the packaging room where every holiday panettone is hand-wrapped.
Thirty years later, Fiasconaro is known across the world for its panettone made in the Sicilian tradition. “There is a high excellence in the raw materials that we select from Sicily,” Agata Fiasconaro says. “We choose what we can find in our land.” Panettone made from Sicilian strawberry jam and Modica chocolate spread, or with pistachios, oranges, apricots, and almonds all grown in Sicily set Fiasconaro apart from its Northern competitors.
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