The Golden Touch Great artists sometimes discover their calling in humble places. Take Gary Rulli, thirty-seven-year-old native of San Francisco and owner of the spectacularly successful Emporio Rulli in Larkspur, California, who found out he loved baking as a high school student, making donuts at a minimart. Today Gary is one of America's most venerated pastry chefs, specializing in Italian sweets that will make your dessert-craving heart do somersaults, flips, and other childlike, untoward things. At nineteen, Gary took a trip with his grandparents that changed his life; he journeyed to Italy, where he became enamored of the pastries, ice creams, and sweets. Apprenticing under pastry chefs in Milan and Turin, Gary worked fourteen hours a day. The bakers, mostly in their sixties and seventies, "had the recipes in their blood. I was determined to save their art, knowing that if I didn't absorb it, it would be forever lost." In 1983, Gary returned to California armed with a dough starter and a dream. Managing to scrape together $150,000, Gary took over the space occupied by a restaurant in Marin County and remodeled in into a tiny but efficient 600-square-foot store. "I never once thought I would fail," says Gary. Successful from the start, the young baker became known in the Bay Area for his Panettone, traditional Milanese Christmas bread. The legend goes that Panettone was born in the sixteenth century, when a baker named Antonio fell in love with a princess and baked a golden, buttery egg bread to win her heart; over the years the name of the bread evolved into Panettone (from pane, for 'bread'), and in the nineteenth century, with the unification of Italy, the bread was embellished with candied red cherries and green citron as a patriotic gesture. The Panettone that's earned Gary his reputation is one he learned to bake at Pasticceria Piave in Milan, where the seventy-five-year-old head baker shared his recipe and even gave him a piece of dough starter for it - highly unusual in the fiercely competitive world of professional pastry-making. "On the plane home, a flight attendant kept the starter cool in the refrigerator so it wouldn't die," recalls Gary with a smile. The baker who had given Gary the starter and the recipe admonished him; "You'll have to nurture this dough like a relationship. You have to tend to it, keep it moist and active, and love it like a wife," he told Rulli, his face as serious as a pope's. Rulli followed his advice religiously. Sixteen years later, the old baker's starter gives life to each of the fragrant panettones Gary bakes. In December, when demand for Panettone is at its peak, Gary bakes over 9,000 pounds of the golden bread. "During a regular week, I bake about fifty panettones, but when the Christmas rush is on, I bake hundreds of times more than that! And let me tell you, with all that kneading and shaping, I don't need to go to the gym," jokes Gary. Each batch of Panettone takes thirty-two hours from start to finish, including proofing and shaping, and the dough requires a watchful eye and strong arms to give it shape and texture. On Thanksgiving Day, 1988, Gary and his wife Jeannie opened their pastry shop in beautiful Larkspur, California, just across the Golden Gate Bridge. "We called it Pasticceria Rulli, because we only did pastries and desserts then." The shop has expanded twice since its birth eleven years ago, and Gary and Jeannie changed its name to Emporio Rulli. Today the couple keeps Marin County happily supplied with soups, sandwiches, frittatas, top-of-the-line wines (including a number of great Tuscan and Veneto reds), house-roasted coffee, freshly baked breads, zeppole, and gelati. Their shop metamorphosed from a humble gathering and grazing spot to an elegant European café-cum- wineshop, where the centerpiece is a mahogany and marble display case crafted in Siena. Gary and Jeannie import candied fruit from Milan, paper molds from Lake Como, and sugar crystals from a confectioner in Genoa - all for Gary's monumental panettone. Other ingredients, just as exquisite and as painstakingly obtained, grace other Rulli signature sweets. "It took three years to convince Gary to serve low-fat and non-fat milk in caffe latte and cappuccino," teases Jeannie. "He won't make muffins or bagels or anything that isn't strictly Italian, and he looks for the purest of ingredients available. That's why we've been so successful. He's not satisfied with anything but the best." Having tasted Gary's buttery, delicate panettone and his spicy, rich Panforte - better than any I had sampled in Siena, its hometown - I know Jeannie is right. At Emporio Rulli, Panini, cakes, and cookies of every size, shape, and color imaginable taunt and beckon; there's no way to watch your calories here, and why would you? After all, this is Emporio Rulli, a place where appetite has nothing to do with hunger, a place where temptation runs rampant and no one can resist. This is an emporium of the senses, where Gary's uncompromising attitude toward quality and his great skill have combined to create that rare Italian gift to the world; a place where the search for the best ingredients is an honorable quest and knowing how to enjoy food is still an art form.    - By Micol Negrin    Article Courtesy of La Cucine Italiana - December 1999