Stuck with dry, leftover panettone? Turn it into French toast

I’ve long thought of panettone as one of those love-to-hate Christmas traditions, like ugly sweaters and the fruitcake with green cherries in it.

In fact, panettone is a relative of the oft-reviled British fruitcake, albeit fluffier and not usually soaked in alcohol. A dome-shaped brioche stuffed with candied lemon and orange peels and dotted with fruit, the pastry appears to go back to 15th century Milan. Today, it’s eaten across Italy, and even the world, over the holidays. I’m increasingly seeing big boxes of it at discount stores like Marshalls. Trinacria on North Paca Street sells four different versions.

You may have gotten some for Christmas.

Dome-shaped and stuffed with dried fruit, panettone is said to date back to 15th century Milan. Now, it's gone global. (Christina Tkacik)

“I remember dreading it as a kid,” said Luke Ilardo, who co-owns the traveling bakery Doppio Pasticceria with partner Megan Cowman. When Ilardo was growing up in Baltimore, his Sicilian-born nonna always brought some she’d found at stores like Nordstrom or Trader Joe’s. Unfortunately for grandma: “It just wasn’t good,” he said, calling it “very, very dry,” and tasting as though it had sat on a shelf for a long, long time.

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The trip from Italy doesn’t do panettone any favors in the freshness department, either. It seems to taste stale within nanoseconds of opening.

While Ilardo said there is such a thing as good panettone — “moist and rich” — it’s seriously labor intensive and hard to replicate. “It is a notoriously long process,” he said, and can require days to allow the naturally-leavened dough to rise and proof. “After you bake it, in order to keep it collapsing on itself, you hang it upside down. Not many home cooks are going to tackle that one.”

The problem of stale panettone isn’t unique to the U.S.

In an interview from 2014, Italian chef Massimo Bottura — whose restaurant Osteria Francescana has earned no fewer than three Michelin stars — described leftover panettone as something that’s always “too dry,” and not very pleasant to eat.

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Slice panettone into pieces that will easily fit into a frying pan. (Christina Tkacik)

The good news: There are ways to transform this loaf into something edible.

Bottura calls a recipe “a solution to a problem,” which I love. His solution, then, for leftover panettone is to turn it into souffle. The process is a clever riff on panettone’s original shape.

But as is so often the case with the recipes of professional chefs, it’s a lot of work. You dry out your panettone and turn it into bread crumbs. You separate eggs, turning the yolks into custard and the whites into peaks. You melt chocolate. You bake.

Our solution to dry panettone is much simpler: Turn it into French toast.

After purchasing some panettone at Trinacria — I went with a low-rise version made by Bellino, which I figured would be easier to cut — I took it home and followed a standard French toast recipe, using a ratio of 1/4 cup of milk per egg and adding salt. At her home kitchen, my co-worker Stokely Baksh used cream instead of milk, and added brown sugar and cloves to the egg. I kept mine plain and added syrup and whipped cream.

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She and I both loved our separate versions. Her kids were not fans of the candied fruit.