Luca Zucchini

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AtelieReale

via Fossano, 15
12040 Cervere (Cuneo)
+39 0172 474132

Luca is the dominus, the leader of a pastry and bread making lab that is not in a restaurant, but right next to one. Between the vegetable garden and the porch of the Antica Corona Reale in Cervere. Hence the name AtelierReale: a constantly active laboratory of sweetness. Led by Luca Zucchini: born in 1988, roots in Giaveno (in Val di Susa), catering school in Pinerolo, specialized training with Rolando and Francesca Morandin, a stop at Boscareto Resort and since 2011 at work in the Relais & Châteaux establishment in the province of Cuneo as head pastry-chef. Then, as rex of the lab opened in 2016, making a virtue out of necessity.

«At the restaurant, we would make some panettoni for the best clients. But soon these panettoni became one, three, five, six hundred. We no longer knew where to put them», says patron Gian Piero Vivalda. Hence the decision to create some special place to make the leavened products. And not only for the restaurant. Also for wine shops, delicatessens, classy grocery shops. «I love working the dough. It relaxes me. During the panettone season I arrive here at 4 a.m. I make the first dough by myself, surrounded by silence», the pastry chef admits. His feet are well set in the ground, despite his ambitions. Preparing crispy bread sticks rolled out by hand, as well as fine tuning the Nuvola Reale, the spring-summer and autumn leavened product that covers the time that goes from Colomba Reale to Panettone Reale.

Nuvola is a suave and light leavened product. A sort of evolved Venetian cake, with double leavening, nourished by Petra’s Panettone flour, mother yeast, very fresh egg yolks, butter made from centrifuged cream, natural mineral water, vanilla pods from the Vanuatu islands, acacia honey and candied fruits. Made of black cherries, apricots from Costigliole, white figs from Apulia, mandarins from Calabria and pineapple. And pink grapefruit for sunnier notes. While for the autumn there are the earthy notes of dark chocolate and powdered coffee.

by

Cristina Viggè

from Lombardy, she graduated in Literature and started working as a journalist. Then she changed direction, towards travels, food and wine. She now directs Fuori Magazine, the new editorial project of Petra-Molino Quaglia