Pandoro: The better looking Italian cousin of the brioche
Pandoro, which literally means “bread of gold” is a traditional Italian cake from Verona with a flavor that instantly puts me back in my grandmother’s kitchen. Soft and fluffy, the egg, butter and flour contains the same ingredients as the brioche, only the cake rises higher and the dough isn’t brushed to make that crispy croissant-y crust.
Pandoro is a wonderful dessert and comes in an large and impressively stylish looking box that contains the star-shaped cake wrapped in an airtight bag and comes with powdered confectioner’s sugar on the side. My grandmother’s technique was to slit the bag open at the top, pour in the sugar, and shake the bag until the sugar coated the entire cake. Once the cake was cut, we would take turns dipping our slices into the “sugar bag”.
The inside is a delightfully sound yellow cake. The usual size feeds up to 12 people, easily. The pandoro I found at my local Italian market, pictured here, is a mini version but easily feeds three.
Where To Find It:
It used to be that you could only find this in department and specialty stores around the holiday season, but for a while now they’ve been popping up in the US around the food sections of Ross and Marshalls stores. Don’t gag – as the announcements in those stores periodically remind you, they get their stock from canceled orders from department stores, which doesn’t necessarily mean that the food products have reached their expiry dates (although I always check anyway, ahem).
What To Look For:
I should mention here that my family are all involved in food distribution. So aside from being Italian, and therefore obsessed with food, illness and …no, actually, discussions are pretty much always centered around those two in some way. The point is, food is a really big deal. So bringing around a box of sub-standard pandoro to an Italian family would be a surefire way of being thrown out. Or maybe just frowned at with plenty of finger groupings being bobbed up and down. (You know what I mean, right? That funny hand gesture they do? I’m Italian, I do it, I still think its funny. I digress.) There are a variety of brands out there, but the best ones are:
Tre Marie: Pretty hard to find this one, so if you do you’ve hit the jackpot. Their website states that some of their products are made exclusively for distribution to pasticcerie and Italian bars (which are really more like French cafes than the places we might call “bars”). You can find it on Amazon for a small fortune of $31.99. The seller “pastacheese” has a pretty good seller rating on Amazon Marketplace, and sells Torrone, another Italian Christmas tradition, but that’s a whole other article…
Bauli is probably the most prolific brand of Italian baked goods, as they’ve diversified into producing croissants, brioches and even confectionery to cater to the year-round market. Clever clogs that they are, I’ve tasted their other products and they’re pretty gosh-darn-it-good.
