In pursuit of the perfect panettone 🎄🍞

Lessons on baking and life from a master pastry chef

I recently learned that the Italian pastry maestro Vincenzo Santoro passed away earlier this month in Milan at the age of 72. While I only spent one day with him, I remember his energy and passion vividly. This is a revised version of a piece I wrote last year where I share more of his story and the impact our brief meeting had on me.

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Vincenzo Santoro (right) and his associate Domenico Di Clemente

I’ve never been one for astrology or the Myers-Briggs system, but if there is a personality test I can relate to it would be the Enneagram. Through and through, I’m Type 7 – The Enthusiast, generally characterized by a constant desire to chase something new. I’ve been this way since I was a child when my list of potential future jobs included ecologist, interior designer, news reporter, sanitation worker, or homesteader in the Alaskan wilderness.

Eventually, I settled on journalism exactly because each story allowed me to live someone else’s routine and immerse myself in their world if only for a day. That was the experience I had with legendary pastry chef Vincenzo Santoro, at the helm of Pasticceria Martesana, a bakery known for the traditional Italian Christmas bread called panettone.

I met him in 2021 while capturing his craft for this video for Eater.

Our 4 a.m. start time was made even more challenging by the chilly November air as we headed out of the center of Milan towards a large industrial complex still shrouded in darkness.

Inside the sprawling bakery was buzzing with dozens of pastry chefs wearing tall white hats and moving at lightning speed around a variety of cakes and cookies. Vincenzo was already there, incredibly chipper and ready to go. I downed a few shots of espresso and fumbled with my gear, my eyes watering from the bright lights.

To start, Vincenzo presented his “dear friend” – not a human one, but living all the same – a sourdough starter that he had been feeding and nurturing for over 50 years – the basis for his inimitable panettone recipe.

Another key ingredient was the dried fruit – raisins and Sicilian citrus. Vincenzo smelled handfuls of it before dropping it into the sticky, yellow dough. He waited and listened as the machine turned, adding more liquid based on the sound and his years of expertise.

It was never a given that Enzo Santoro would become renowned for the Milanese tradition of panettone. In fact, he grew up far away from the city in a modest home in Puglia. When one of his brothers went to Milan to find work, he soon invited Enzo to join him and take a job as a dishwasher. Enzo remembered those early days when he would pass by the Martesana pastry shop on his way to the restaurant and stare at the sweets in the window with the awe and longing of a child. Eventually, the baker noticed the boy and offered him a job. Vincenzo began to work at Martesana at the age of 14 and eventually took over the business.

Even as he approached 70, Vincenzo seemed to retain every bit of passion and wonderment that first led him to the world of pastry. For hours, I watched as he and his baking partner Domenico lovingly shaped each ball of dough by hand and then placed it into a paper mold using a razor blade to cut a cross into the top (a benediction! he said with a smile.) At Christmastime, the bakery hand-produces more than 27,000 pieces of panettoni per month.

“Enzo, in his 50 years of experience, still says we can do it even better,” Domenico told me.

With the kind smile of a grandfather, Vincenzo pressed a hot cookie into my hand as we waited for the panettoni to finish baking. While some parts of the process required extreme patience, others demanded speed. When the steaming bread came out of the oven, Vincenzo, Domenico, and their assistants quickly flipped them over on special racks to prevent the panettone’s signature domed tops from collapsing in on themselves. Then Vincenzo cut one in half to show me what the perfect panettone looks like when a baker respects the needs and timing of the ingredients.

“So long as I feel alive, I will never stop doing this…it is a magic that comes from passion,” he said.

I met Vincenzo Santoro at a formative time in my own career and I often think of what I learned just by observing him. Vincenzo committed himself to one discipline that he practiced day in and day out until his panettone became the new standard for the product.

In my own life, I find it all too easy to rush the process and feel pulled in so many different directions that a project starts to lose its meaning before it’s even completed. But Vincenzo knew that the sourdough starter he lovingly tended to each day wasn’t just for the year’s Christmas rush – he was crafting a legacy around something he loved, a recipe that would bring people joy for generations to come.

At the end of the day, Vincenzo sent us home with a few panettoni and the most endearing kiss on the cheek. He may no longer be with us, but his lessons on how to nurture a passion are still on my mind every year at Christmastime: To achieve our full potential, we must inch forward one day at a time, and only by living for the art itself will we find the motivation to continue.