Best pastry chef, best breakfast, always among the best patisseries in Italy. Paolo Sacchetti has won everything with his pastry shop Nuovo Mondo di Prato. But first of all he remains a greedy of life. We went to have breakfast with him
Paolo Sacchetti has more than fifty years, white hair and the enthusiasm of a teenager. He seems to face life as a greedy sinks the spoon in a dessert of good ones. He loves to tell how as a boy he ate up to 25 pastas a day, a perfect way to show how passionate and reckless he is.
Fiorentino, he built the New World in Prato he wanted thanks to his wife Edi. She worked in a wool mill as an accountant, one of the first to close with the textile crisis, and it was she who had the idea of opening a pastry shop. They set up on their own, it was 1989 and today the Nuovo Mondo patisserie is a mecca for gourmands. At their side to work together, their son Andrea "Sacchettino" Sacchetti. And out of the queue.
In the sector he is now more than known, vice-president of the AMPI, Italian Pastry Chef Academy whose president is Iginio Massari. To the general public he arrived thanks to TV, face of The masters of panettone, the first broadcast dedicated to the best Italian yeast makers. His panettone is always in the rankings among the best in Italy, but for Prato he is the man of the Prato Peaches; and with peaches we mean bombs of brioche dough filled with cream and soaked with alchermes.
Best Italian pastry chef in 2012, Best Italian breakfast for the Gambero Rosso guide in 2015 and always every year among the best pastry shops. And to say that the place is small, not at all flashy, in a town in the Italian province that has seen better years from an economic point of view. A long and narrow place, half occupied by the window and with just a corner at the end to have a coffee and have breakfast standing. It soon becomes clear that the substance is being looked after here.
I will never get tired of sweets. Good things cannot come to boredom
The real Italian pastry
"All the tourist cities do not have good bakeries, it is frequent. Where instead the customers are local the quality rises ", says Sacchetti, who in Prato divides the square with many top-level patisseries and even a world champion like Luca Mannori. The people of Prato are really passionate, of the groupies, so much so that they queue up to discover the new creations presented each year at Eat Prato.
No American weeding cakes and cupcakes, in the New World the language is that of the most traditional Italian pastry, the most locally possible raw materials and the knowledge of the textbook technique. There are no winks to the fashions of the moment: and the story of Italian pastry, from the grandmother's cake to the profiteroles, is staged. Next to the mignon, plum cakes and apple pies, bignolata and tiramisu are baked, and a Fedora light as a feather: the essence of pastry because it brings together some of the fundamental bases such as puff pastry, sponge cake, custard and cream whipped, all enclosed in a chocolate leaf. "Massari of these has eaten two in a row".
The breakfast
"In all of Tuscany, breakfast is a must", and in fact the variety of proposals, mixtures and recipes is extraordinary. In the New World you can find the butter-only French croissants, the Italian-style croissants with egg, the mother-yeast croissants, the apple puff, the Calfoutis with cherries, the ricotta and orange tart, the cream-filled chocolate Saccottino dense and brown, the long Cornetto with apricot jam in which the jam is all along the dough to feel it at every bite, and the Cornetto alla torinese, with its tips almost touching. If you enter and ask for "a brioche", they give you a Polish, classic Italian brioche with 900 g of butter on kg of flour. "But for breakfast the most sold is always the Sfogliatina with the cream".
The inventor of the cremino
A brioche without yeast, a heresy invented by Paolo Sacchetti, presented to the masters of the ANPI in 1998 and now spread throughout Italy. It is very practical: you can work it first, freeze it, it has no yeast, but very much butter, and you cook it from frozen. The result is a breakfast consisting of 30 g of brioche dough rich in butter and 30 g of custard.
The Tuscan tradition
Classics of the region for breakfast the Pappatacio, made with raisins and called so because it seems to be attacked by dog parasites; the Parisian (Venetian with cream), the rice pudding; the Scendiletto, two sheets with a pastry cream finger, so called because it was the first dessert made in the morning by the pastry chef who invented it. The New World also produces Biscuits from Prato, Ricciarelli, Quaresimali, Schiacciata alla fiorentina or with grapes and, in season, rice fritters and rags.
The leavened
The panettone here is classic, with raisins, orange and cedar and topped with an almond glaze. They produce it from November to Epiphany and to get one, it is better to reserve it in advance; also because you have to go to pick it up in person, other than the internet. The handmade doves are produced in the three weeks before Easter, the pandori only under Christmas and only on order. All year round you can find the Giulebbe, a panfruit-shaped panettone with all the products of the territory: dried figs from Carmignano instead of raisins, walnuts from Val Bisenzio instead of candied fruit and glazed pine nuts. In combination, the sinful jar of zabaione with vin santo.
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