Discover Nonna Grazia
- Home
- About us
About Nonna
Love & Panettone
We love panettone, this melt-in-the-mouth brioche with a taste that goes straight to our hearts.
With Nonna, we express our love for Italian gastronomy, and in particular for this brioche, the most difficult in the world to make!
Nonna is an ode to tradition. The one we want to keep close to our hearts, even if we’ve dusted it off a bit and brought it up to date…
Enter our world, where sourdough rules and flavour is uncompromising.
The panettone tradition – a story where Toni is the hero
Panettoni or Pan de Toni
Two legends tell the story of panettone's origin
One legend has it that Ughetto degli Atellani, a noble cavalier from Milan, posed as a kitchen boy to woo the daughter of the baker Toni. To woo his beloved, he invented a sweet bread topped with raisins, citrons and orange peel.
The second, and our favorite, tells the story of how the chefs at Duke Ludovico Sforza’s court burned the dessert while preparing for Christmas Eve. Luckily, Toni, a young Milanese employee in the kitchen, had prepared a sweet bread with the ingredients left over in the kitchen, thus creating the Panettone and saving New Year’s Eve!
According to one or other of these stories, this is how “Pane de Toni” (Panettoni) or Panettone came into being.
Our natural sourdough
The panettone tradition is especially strong in the Milan area. On the other hand, the sourdough we use to make Nonna’s panettones comes from the Piedmont region. This northern region of Italy is home to many of the great panettone masters, including Rolando and Francesca Morandin. It was they, true panettone icons, who shared with us the basics of the panettone art, as well as their century-old family sourdough.