NEW YORK – Who owns panettone?

In the last decade, the Christmas classic has burst its Italian borders and gained a global profile. Like Basque burnt cheesecake and French croissants, panettone is being tested and transformed far from home, with new flavours such as black sesame, Aperol spritz and cacio e pepe.

There are Japanese versions leavened with sake lees and Brazilian ones stuffed with dulce de leche, supermarket minis that cost US$2 (S$2.70), and truffled ones that fetch nearly US$200.

When the standard was set, most likely in 15th-century Milan, panettone was a domed sweet bread with a tender, bright-golden crumb, scented and studded with sugared fruit.

It belongs to the same luxurious holiday tradition as German stollen, Polish chalka and British fruitcake: treats made once a year from expensive stores of butter and eggs, refined flour and sugar, spices from Asia and preserved fruit from the Mediterranean.

Bits of chocolate were added later, and regional ingredients such as lemon on the Amalfi Coast and hazelnuts in Piedmont.

As Italy unified, panettone became a national symbol of Christmas. Extravagantly wrapped and ribboned loaves became status symbols and popular gifts. But with the advent of commercial baking, the product inside the boxes became increasingly dry and flat-tasting, with cheaper ingredients such as candied squash and milk powder.

The surge of appreciation for panettone is both restoring interest in the bread and fomenting new conflicts among those who make it.

Disputes have broken out between purists and ultra-purists, between traditionalists and modernists, and between Italy and the rest of the world.

The battles have played out in trade unions, legislatures and online, where a passionate worldwide community of sourdough bakers weighs in on matters such as hydration, acidulation and almonds versus hazelnuts.

Ms Laura Lazzaroni, a journalist and bread consultant, said panettone is following the arc traced by pizza: A food not considered particularly interesting at home catches on abroad, is adopted by foreign artisans and then returns to great fanfare.

“We never fell out of love with pizza, but we didn’t think about it very much,” she said. “Then people started coming home from America saying, ‘I had better pizza in California than in – insert name of my town in Italy here – and we have to do something about it.’”

Now that panettone’s reputation has risen, so have the stakes for Italian bakers, who are jockeying not only for ownership of that tradition, but also for market share.

Conpait, the pastry trade group, estimates that market will be worth about US$650 million in 2022, with 10 per cent growth of “artigianale” over “industriali” products.

Best-of lists, awards and contests such as the new Coppa del Mondo del Panettone have proliferated.

“This is a world championship, not a church bake sale,” said Mr Giuseppe Piffaretti, who started the Coppa del Mondo in 2019.

The struggle to control panettone has been raging for 20 years, since Italian exporters sounded alarms that foreign-made versions were capturing the global market.

Panettone has long been popular in Argentina, Peru and Brazil, where Italian food arrived along with immigrant populations in the late 19th century. Many of the panettone sold in supermarkets in the United States are made in South America, especially by the giants Bauducco and D’Onofrio.

Unlike tomatoes from San Marzano or mortadella from Bologna, panettone from Milan is not a protected regional speciality under the European Union’s labelling system.

Mr Luigi Biasetto, a top baker in Padua, is leading an effort to have panettone declared part of the world’s “intangible cultural heritage” by Unesco, as Neapolitan pizza was in 2017.

In 2005, the Italian government passed laws that dictate the ingredients and decreed that “natural fermentation” is required to produce panettone labelled “Made in Italy”. But the code makes no distinctions between wild yeasts and cultivated ones, between organic and bleached flour, between fruit candied with sugar and with glucose – distinctions that have become increasingly important to bakers and customers.

Like all bread, traditional panettone was naturally leavened, giving it a taste, tang and texture that got lost in the translation to industry, like the move from aged cheddar to American cheese.

The best ones combine the fluff of cotton candy, the creaminess of French toast, the gentle pull of a fresh doughnut and the buttery softness of pound cake.

Now, modern bakers are trying to recapture those qualities despite – or because of – the notorious challenges of making panettone from scratch.

“It’s the most difficult product to make,” Mr Piffaretti said. “Panettone isn’t a recipe, it’s a lifestyle.”

Mr Iginio Massari, a nationally revered master in Brescia (his panettone is called simply “L’immortale”), said it takes 10 years to train an employee to make it correctly.

Mr Massari’s American protege, Mr Roy Shvartzapel, put it another way – “Panettone is the mountaintop” of baking.

In 2021, Ms Lazzaroni, the bread consultant, curated a museum exhibition about the evolution of Italian food from 1970 to 2050, including three panettone: one from the industrial producer Alemagna, one made by Mr Massari and one from Mr Shvartzapel.

“Panettone is a perfect example of how Italian taste is always travelling back and forth, being contaminated and then reborn,” she said. “It would be wrong to see it as something that belongs only to us.” NYTIMES