Sourdough "Mother Yeast" Tradition
The ancient recipe demands that Panettone cake be made exclusively using natural sour dough, also referred to as “Mother Yeast”.
This type of dough is nothing other than fermented dough made of wheat flour and water. The microorganisms involved (mainly saccharomycetes) are maintained by applying a rigorous procedure, and develop under conditions that are monitored continuously.
Maina’s sour dough is a live organism that has been reproducing itself since 1974, when our production plant was transferred to the current premises in the Tagliata suburb of Fossano. Before this move, the sour dough had different characteristics because it was “worked” under different ambient conditions. In fact, this sour dough is a real live organism that not only feeds on water and flour, but that also “breathes” in the air from the environment in which it lives. This makes the characteristics of the sour dough unique.
Using sour dough involves a process that requires great skills and a lot of care. At Maina, the Mother Yeast is freshened up with flour and water every day, and every day the sour dough to be used for making Panettone is obtained starting with the “Mother Yeast”, refreshed a number of times.
Today, Maina still works their “mother” sour dough entirely by hand, without the help of any machines. This makes it a very complex, delicate procedure, so much so that the smallest variations in the process can have a negative effect on the quality of the product produced.
In this case, fermentation takes place much more slowly than during leavening using other types of yeast. Leavening takes a lot longer but produces a product that is clearly finer.
The product obtained in this way is a Panettone cake that is extremely soft, and with a more pleasing, characteristic taste. In practice, the sour dough accentuates the organoleptic characteristics of the product, keeping the various flavours and aromas intact.
Finally, with the transformation of the complex organic molecules into more simple molecules due to the action of the microorganisms in the dough, the product is easier to digest and can be kept for much longer, without having to use any preservatives.
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