Happy New Year from Academia Barilla and Italian Food Lovers!
As we get into 2009 and we move from a Christmas blog design to a Winter make-up, we want to share with you a delicious Season treat from Academia Barilla. We recently blogged about panettone, inviting you to bake your own one by presenting it as recipe of the month for the month of December. Today we introduce to you Academia Barilla’s lavish and exclusive version of the traditional Italian Christmas cake.
Academia Barilla and Master Pastry Chef Corrado Vicina are happy to introduce the Four Season Panettone (Panettone Quattro Stagioni), an exceptional combination of intense flavors that will make you discover, slice after slice, all the taste of four different ingredients in one panettone cake: chocolate for a Winter taste, cherries bring all the flavor of Spring, apricots stand for Summer and chestnuts to bring us back the autumn gourmet mood.
The presentation of the Four Season Panettone preparation included here above illustrates the process that requires Master Pastry Chef Corrado Vicina three full days of intensive artisanal preparation at the Academia Barilla Culinary Center in Parma, Italy.
Chef Corrado Vicina, with the help of the Academia Barilla Chef Team, start processing the purest yeast with first choice quality ingredients, individually selected one by one.
The Academia Barilla Culinary Center has a Pastry Lab with professional, state-of-the-art bakery tools that allow creating the perfect dough for a mass yet limited production. Just few hundreds Four Season Panettones are baked each year, and they are available exclusively through the Academia Barilla Culinary Center in Parma, Italy.
Chef Corrado Vicina has a secret recipe for the Four Season Panettone, sorry we cannot share it – but we can tell you how the Four Season Panettone is made.
As you can see from the slideshow, after processing the dough in the four flavor variations, the fours seasons merge together into a smooth hug after two days of leavening.
Before putting the cakes in the oven Chef Vicina puts his final Chef touch, a sprinkle of pure white almonds and a cloud of grains of white sugar. The panettone cakes are baked in transparent ovens, so the baking can be constantly overviewed.
After one hour of intense oven heat, the panettones get hung upside-down drying for an entire night, a 12-hours process that allows eliminating excess humidity and that will make the Four Season Panettone softer and fresher.
Academia Barilla’s Four Season Panettone gets a very simple yet elegant packaging: a protective inner plastic bag seals flavor and softness, while an hand-wrapped red wrap makes it perfect for a gourmet Season gift!
Happy New Year again from Academia Barilla and Italian Food Lovers!
