From a South London Garage, Panettone Obsessive Cem Altinsoy Has Created Something Remarkable

By Adam Coghlan

Features - 22 Dec 2023 -

Cem K Altinsoy is not your typical baker. About 15 years ago, just as he was graduating with a degree in mathematics from Imperial College, Altinsoy had the London 2012 Olympics in his sights. “I was very much all about Olympic weightlifting,” he says. “Then I got badly injured.” After the global recession in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, he couldn’t get a job and was at a bit of a loss. “I just thought, okay, what do I do now?” remembering that his grandma would make Turkish pastries on Sundays as a child. He loved bread, anything pastry. “I also used to like going in the kitchen and baking a cake, so I signed up to the basic patisserie course at Le Cordon Bleu in 2008-9.”

In 2011, Altinsoy would leave London for northern Cyprus (his parents are Turkish-Cypriot) where he opened a patisserie. But a trip to Milan six years ago stopped him in his tracks and would bring him home. He had discovered panettone, the peerless festive Italian sweet bread. In the COVID Christmas of 2020, trading under the name Kouttone (a portmanteau of kouglof-panettone), he retailed his creations for the first time. Thanks to approval from some of London’s most discerning tasters, his panettone blew up in gourmet circles. He sold 100. Three years later, he’s still doing it and only it, still searching for perfection, still, as he says, “learning.” All of this is taking place in the garage he converted at his parents’s home in Deptford, south London: A room decked out with professional ovens, proofers, industrial mixers, and premium ingredients. All overseen by a man on a mission.

Altinsoy has already created the best panettone in Britain, a fruitcake that an Italian maestro would surely be proud of, but he thinks it can be better. It is all at once light, complex, floral, sweet, a cause for celebration. He calls his vocation, this process of making panettone, “the pinnacle of baking” and is showing no signs of stopping. In time, he says, he wants to open a pizzeria with his brother, but that’s for another day. For now, it’s panettone, panettone, and more panettone.

This is a behind-the-scenes look at how these creations come to being, with notes from the baker himself.

Photography by Michaël Protin.