(CNN) — When thinking of Sicily, it’s easy to imagine white sandy beaches, timeless architecture and a host of delicacies like arancini, caponata and cannoli. But panettone would not be among the first things to come to mind.
The popular Christmas cake is traditionally baked in the north of Italy, particularly in the city of Milan, where it was invented. That’s almost 1,000 miles — the length of the whole country — from Palermo, Sicily’s main city. But not far from Palermo, Nicola Fiasconaro is upending panettone tradition — and exporting his upstart creation all over the world.It all started in Castelbuono, a tiny village framed between the Mediterranean Sea and the Madonie, one of Sicily’s highest mountain ranges.
Here, the Fiasconaro family has long owned an ice cream shop and bar in the town’s main square, and in the late 1980s, Nicola was a young pastry chef with a penchant for innovation: “My father used to buy 2,000 industrially made panettones from the north, to sell in our bar during the holidays, but I challenged him to make our own,” he says.
In a land where tradition is paramount, it was a bold idea: “Nobody was making panettone in Sicily. People thought I was crazy. They asked me ‘Nicola, why don’t you make cassata, cannoli, pignolate?’ which are the traditional recipes that have always distinguished Sicily. But I thought that panettone should not only come from Milan, Piedmont or Veneto, where that kind of baking school was born.”Thus the very first Fiasconaro panettone came to be. It was called “Mannetto,” because it contained manna — a sweet resin extracted from ash trees, which acts as a natural sweetener: “Northern culture, but Southern ingredients,” explains Fiasconaro.
