D'eCaffè in Long Beach selling standout Italian panettone

If you like panettone, or giving some to your friends — there's a great option this holiday season: d'eCaffè in Long Beach is importing elaborate panettone from a family bakery in Italy.

Pastry chef Francesco Manfredi and his wife, Micah Mea, decamped from San Diego to open a shop on Park Avenue in Long Beach this summer, where they've been preparing traditional desserts that are hard to find elsewhere on Long Island. Last month, they started offering fruitcakes coming directly from Francesco's brother, Domenico Manfredi, and their family bakery in Salerno, Italy.

In November, Domenico became a three-time winner at the 2024 World Panettone Championship in Naples, Italy. This year's creation was a passion fruit ganache panettone inspired by a controversial statue in Naples..

The Long Beach bakery stocks 13 varieties that are frosted with flavors like pistachio, salted caramel, Cointreau, white chocolate and lemon. Most if not all ingredients are sourced from around the small town of Teggiano, in the Vallo di Diano, a UNESCO heritage site. It takes Domenico three days to prepare one from start to finish. On Mondays, he packs them into fancy boxes and ships them by air so they arrive in New York by Wednesday, where they currently sell for $50-$60 each.  

"You feed the mother yeast, then put all ingredients together. It's kind of difficult because you have to see it grow, and if it's not growing the right way, it's not going to be a perfect panettone with the air, the shapes," Francesco said. "The panettone is a sweet bread combined with natural flavor, raisins, oranges, citrus, butter, eggs, an harmony of these ingredients. And with mother yeast, it gets all together, all the aroma, all the perfume of these natural ingredients." 

The history of panettone has been debated, but Francesco recounted a popular story about the holiday fruitcake that dates it back to 1495, when a young cook named Toni impressed the duke of Milan with a last-minute dessert recipe he created with raisins and candied fruit. The bread is given as gifts around the holiday season. The raisins and citrus symbolize prosperity, love and eternity, he said. 

The frutti di bosco panettone has a fruity aroma and flavorful pops of small red currants that Francesco said grow wild in the forests around their hometown. Unlike the store-bought boxed panettone, this bread is exceedingly fluffy and moist, and the ingredients taste first rate. Mea said that the bread will last for a month on the counter, if kept tightly wrapped in its plastic. While there were plenty of varieties on offer during two recent visits, it's best to call ahead as the bakery has been getting hundreds of preorders.

In addition to selling his brother's panettone, Francesco is also baking other traditional Christmas treats like struffoli (honey dough balls), roccoco (dense gingery cookies) and hand-painted marzipan fruit. 

d'eCaffè, 151 E. Park Ave., Long Beach, 516-726-7005, decaffeny.com. Open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sundays (through Dec. 29, and then closed on Sundays).

By Andi Berlin

andi.berlin@newsday.comAndiBerlin

Andi Berlin is from Arizona and does not know where she is going. But when she gets there, she’ll find something beautiful and delicious that the world needs to taste.