For every pastry chef developing a recipe, there comes a moment when the thing standing between perfection and total disaster finally steps into the light.

For pastry chef Matt Tinder, that moment came four years ago in the kitchen at San Francisco’s Coi, when he pulled his second loaf of panettone out of the oven, flipped it upside down to keep it from deflating, and watched it implode. The first had come out surprisingly well, but now with this one, three days of work lay in crumbs on the floor. He studied the uneven pockets of air in the underdone center, and it was abundantly clear. The thing gone wrong was the yeast.

Without extremely lively yeast, panettone is essentially a bad fruitcake­—­dense, sickeningly sweet, and not a pretty sight. And like bad fruitcake, loaves of bad panettone sit on many tables this time of year. But this is where the similarities end.

Technically, panettone is not a cake but a bread of leavened wheat flour blended with an extravagant amount of eggs, sugar, and butter, then spiked with some dried fruit (usually raisins and candied citrus), and baked into a low, round loaf or into a tall, gently peaked one. A good panettone is gently sweet and airy, with a pleasing chewiness.

Read the full article at Bon Appétit.