Panettone is normally seen around the Christmas holiday, and the legends vary (as these things do), but the origins may be in Milan, in the 15th century.
Panettone is a very rich, light cake-like bread studded with fruit and nuts. It starts off with a simple sponge, which is left to rest for 6+ hours, before butter and eggs and egg yolks and sugar and milk and more flour are all mixed in, creating a very elastic, responsive dough. No doubt the extended sponge resting time has something to do with this.
Here you can see the sponge after warm milk, salt and butter have been added, and mixed until almost a pancake-batter consistency is achieved. From here, the eggs, which are beaten with sugar until light and frothy, are mixed in, and then you proceed much like a regular bread dough, working in flour a little at a time until it bounces back. Once the dough is kneaded, it rests while you prepare the fruit and nut mixture.
My recipe called for anise seeds, but as you may have heard, Indiana is buried under ice, and I wasn't going out for anise. So, I substituted fennel instead, and I don't like pine nuts, as a general rule, so I used almonds instead because, well, I had them in the pantry! I ground the fennel fairly fine, then added the almonds to the mortar and crunched them up.
Again, the original recipe calls for citron and raisins. Well, I don't like citron (YUCK! I can not abide that stuff), and I thought apricots and dates sounded more fun, anyway. :) So, I chopped them up, about a half cup of each (the recipe calls for a half cup total, but eh... what's a little more dried fruit among friends?)
So, the dough was resting for the time it took to grind, chop and mix the fruit and nuts, and then I patted it out into an oval, pouring my "tasty bits" on top, and then I began to knead. And knead. And knead. And knead. It's harder to mix in fruit and nuts this way than one might think, and I wanted to make sure I had the fruit evenly distributed through the dough. So, I worked the dough for about 10 minutes, without having to add too much additional flour. I didn't want to make the bread tough! I just wanted it good.
The final ball of dough was lumpy with bits of fruit sticking out, but it felt good, still light and elastic and the fennel just smells good! The dough is left to rise for almost two hours, and then shaped into loaves. There are lots of ways to shape panettone. The "As Seen At Christmas" type is usually a tall, round loaf, looking somewhat like a muffin on steroids. I don't have a souffle pan (or a schnazzy special panettone pan!), but I do have a couple of clean, empty #10 steel cans I've scrounged from a couple of other projects (Better War lunch, for one...) and that worked fabulously as a make-shift round pan. The other two loaves were shaped on a baking sheet. Again, they had to rise, and given the raging ice storm outside, it's not unpleasant having bread rising with the oven preheating!
Right before baking, I slashed the loaves. The one in the pan wasn't quite to the top, so that was a bit dicey, but the hearth loaves were easy enough. I slashed one in the traditional "x" shape, and the other with a double "X". The recipe said to put the loaves in the oven for five minutes, then place a tablespoon of butter at the center of each "X" before continuing the baking process.
The fruit and the fennel and the bread, baking in the oven with the light undertone of browning butter as it melted into the bread and drizzled onto the baking pans was intensely wonderful. (One of the best side effects of being a baker.. my house smells amazing!)
Once it came out of the oven, I wanted to get the round loaf out of the pan as soon as possible, so it wouldn't stick to the ribbed side. Oops, one small corner had not been greased enough, apparently, and a small chunk of the bread was stuck. However, the loaves are very light, and rich, with distinct markings and beautiful colour. The crumb is delicate, and the bread? All I can say is... Delizioso pane!
Panettone is a very rich, light cake-like bread studded with fruit and nuts. It starts off with a simple sponge, which is left to rest for 6+ hours, before butter and eggs and egg yolks and sugar and milk and more flour are all mixed in, creating a very elastic, responsive dough. No doubt the extended sponge resting time has something to do with this.
Here you can see the sponge after warm milk, salt and butter have been added, and mixed until almost a pancake-batter consistency is achieved. From here, the eggs, which are beaten with sugar until light and frothy, are mixed in, and then you proceed much like a regular bread dough, working in flour a little at a time until it bounces back. Once the dough is kneaded, it rests while you prepare the fruit and nut mixture.
My recipe called for anise seeds, but as you may have heard, Indiana is buried under ice, and I wasn't going out for anise. So, I substituted fennel instead, and I don't like pine nuts, as a general rule, so I used almonds instead because, well, I had them in the pantry! I ground the fennel fairly fine, then added the almonds to the mortar and crunched them up.
Right before baking, I slashed the loaves. The one in the pan wasn't quite to the top, so that was a bit dicey, but the hearth loaves were easy enough. I slashed one in the traditional "x" shape, and the other with a double "X". The recipe said to put the loaves in the oven for five minutes, then place a tablespoon of butter at the center of each "X" before continuing the baking process.
Once it came out of the oven, I wanted to get the round loaf out of the pan as soon as possible, so it wouldn't stick to the ribbed side. Oops, one small corner had not been greased enough, apparently, and a small chunk of the bread was stuck. However, the loaves are very light, and rich, with distinct markings and beautiful colour. The crumb is delicate, and the bread? All I can say is... Delizioso pane!
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