Quality and tradition have always been the values that guided the choices of the company that is behind one of the most popular Italian Christmas cakes. The Pandoro, the brainchild of pastry chef Domenico Melegatti, allowed his eponymous company to grow over time until it became one of the leading companies in the confectionery sector on an international level.
Melegatti was inspired by a traditional Veronese Christmas cake, the ‘levà’, made with a mixture of flour, milk, and yeasts. He transformed the simple cake enriching it with butter and eggs, and eliminating what he considered counterproductive for leavening, like almonds and grains of sugar. Not only he devised the recipe, but he also gave it the characteristic truncated cone shape with an eight-pointed star section.
According to the legend, a boy, in front of the first slice of the new cake illuminated by a ray of sunlight, exclaimed in amazement: “it’s a golden bread!”, which is the literal translation of the name ‘pandoro‘. On October 14th, 1894, Melegatti registered the copyright of his creation, and 124 years later the pandoro is still prepared in exactly the same way: a leavening of over 10 hours and the 6-7 cycles of mixing the dough adding the ingredients one at a time, for a total of 36 hours to produce the perfect pandoro.
The attention that Melegatti has always paid to the quality of the ingredients used and the implementation of automated production lines capable of maintaining the artisanal characteristics of the end product have been the keys to Melegatti’s success. This success today goes beyond the pandoro and embraces a wide range of pastries, both traditional and innovative, suitable for any occasion.
Ilona Catani Scarlett