12 days of Advent: a Substack Community Celebration #1

an ode to those who dedicate their life to the pursuit of perfection in one very specific thing: in this instance the Italian Christmas bread panettone

Hi, I'm Laura, and I’m a multi-passionate mama of 3, excited about demystifying creativity, obsessed with other people’s pivots and delighted by flat whites, long walks and learning.

Photo by Paolo Nicolello on Unsplash

To achieve our full potential we must inch forward one day at a time. Only by living for the art itself will we find the motivation to continue.

- Anna Muckerman

Welcome to the first of 12 days of Advent: a Substack Community Celebration. It is such a treat for me to share these wonderful people and their gifts for us all with you. Today’s gift is from Anna, an American journalist and filmmaker based in Europe. Over the past several years, she’s travelled around the globe to share the stories of chefs, artists, and growers who create some of the world’s most renowned foods and products. If she doesn’t have a camera in hand, she’s probably baking or painting. Her Substack isHungry with Ideas and you can find her on Instagram here.

For today’s celebration, Anna writes an ode to people who dedicate their life to the pursuit of perfection in one very specific thing – in this case it's the Italian Christmas bread panettone.

Anna writes…

I have to admit I’ve never been one for astrology or the Myers-Briggs system, but if there is one personality test I can relate to it would have to be the Enneagram. Through and through, I’m type 7 – The Enthusiast, who generally speaking, is characterized by a constant desire to chase something new. I’ve been this way since I was a child. While my classmates were dreaming of becoming pilots or doctors, I couldn’t decide between ecologist, interior designer, news reporter, or sanitation worker.

Eventually I settled on journalism (more prestigious but equally as lucrative as sanitation) exactly because each story allowed me to live someone else’s routine and come away having been immersed in another world.

I think that’s why I’m so drawn to food stories. The best restaurants or bakeries in the world are rarely run by people who started yesterday. They are helmed by people like Vincenzo Santoro, the Italian pastry legend, who has dedicated himself so fully to the pursuit of the perfect panettone that he’s spent 50 years developing a recipe and feeding his sourdough starter, which he refers to as a dear friend.

I’m 2021, I had the opportunity to spend a day with Vincenzo and his baking partner Dominico while capturing their craft in this video for Eater. While I was still groggy at the 4 a.m. start time, the pair was as chipper as ever, commenting on the wonderful aromas of the dried fruit before pouring it into the dough that they lovingly shaped by hand. They’d made tens of thousands of these loaves over the course of the years, but every single one received the same attention as if it were their prodigy ready to be sent out into the world.

Panettone is synonymous with Christmas in Italy and many other countries around the world, but few make it like Vincenzo and Dominico do. From the start they were on the dough’s schedule. When the yeast hadn’t tripled in size, they waited. They listened closely to the sound of the dough to give it more liquid when it asked for it. They flipped the bread quickly to prevent it from collapsing in on itself.

For me, as a video journalist (and an Enthusiast) it’s all too easy to rush the process, to feel pulled in so many different directions that a project starts to lose its meaning before it’s even completed. That’s why I’m so inspired by people who can commit to one practice day-in and day-out until the result is the new standard for how a product should be made.

Listening to these master bakers I remember that the seeds (or the starter) we feed today won’t be ready tomorrow. To achieve our full potential we must inch forward one day at a time. Only by living for the art itself will we find the motivation to continue.

At the end of the day, Vincenzo sent us home with two panetonni and the most endearing kiss on the cheek. The bread may be long gone but his lessons on how to nurture a passion are still on my mind every year at Christmastime.

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Thank you so much

Anna Muckerman

for your wonderful piece.

I’d love to know who you’d mention who’s been on this path: this ode to one, beautiful thing in the pursuit of perfection?

Who would you cite? Who would you share?

Laura x