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Naturally Leavened Christmas Panettone
Panettone is often referred to as the Mount Everest of sourdough baking because it’s a project of several days (at least) with sourdough starter modifications, two dough builds, dried fruit soaks and more. All this effort results in a spectacular traditional Italian Christmas bread that’s so delicate and airy it must be hung upside-down to set when it comes out of the oven.
I was too intimidated to make panettone until Breadtopia community member Dan Dee @djd418 generously offered to share his panettone recipe with us. Dan won the Minnesota State Fair Baking Competition Ethnic Baking Sweepstakes Award with this panettone. Starting with translations from Italian blogs several years ago, he developed his own strategies and explains them below.
I’ve tried many Panettone recipes over the years in my personal quest to make a panettone better than the ones you can buy, but I never found a recipe that would yield the soft, silky crumb that I was looking for. That is, until I discovered some Italian recipes that were leavened solely with a specially managed sourdough starter. The results were pretty amazing!
This recipe is adapted from one by the Italian master pastry chef, Iginio Massari, as described on the Italian cooking blogs Fables de Sucre and Inventaricette. Although these sites are in Italian, most browsers (or Google Translate) do a reasonable job of translating if you’re interested in perusing the original blog posts, and also this article, which contains general information that is useful for making panettone, pandoro and colomba.
I worked from the recipe and procedure in the Italian texts and added my notes and tweaks from the last five years of making this recipe. My version doesn’t include any candied fruit peel, rather uses raisins, golden raisins and dried cranberries. I do give the quantities for the raisin and candied peel combination from the original recipe, in case that’s what you would like to use.
Though this recipe is lengthy and fairly detailed, I hope that these instructions will help ensure early successes. It took me several years to get it right!
A Few Notes before we begin…
Make sure you read these sections thoroughly before focusing on the printable recipe, noting in particular the importance of a scale, stand mixer, and if possible, a warm proofing box or other setup (e.g. oven with light on).
Sourdough Starter Management
This recipe requires a very active, 50% hydration, sourdough starter maintained with bread flour. (Don’t use starters, containing whole grain flours, rye, spelt or any other heirloom grain.) By “very active,” I mean that after refreshment, it should triple in volume in 4 hours at around 80F.
If you maintain your starter at 100% hydration, you can create a 50% hydration starter for this recipe by taking 60g of 100% hydration starter, mixing with 30g water and then adding 90g bread flour. After mixing the ingredients together to form a shaggy dough, turn them out onto a clean working surface and knead until smooth and homogenous. Cover and let rise in a warm spot (~80F) until tripled. This could be 4-5 hours or longer.
For each subsequent refreshment, take 60g of 50% hydration starter, mix in 30g of water, add 60g of bread flour and mix as before.
If the starter triples in volume at a warm room temp (~80F) in 4 hours, it’s ready for making panettone. If not, refresh the starter more often, say 2-3 times per day for several days (or weeks) until it’s active enough to triple in volume in 4 hours.
Some panettone recipes talk about bathing and binding the sourdough starter. I’ve only occasionally felt the need to bind and bathe my starter in order to lower its acidity. As long as it smells good and I have enough time to refresh it multiple times, I do as I described above and it evolves to smell yeasty and low-sour. You can read more about starter bathing here, though, if you’d like to give it a try.
High Gluten Flour
Though I use bread flour to refresh the starter, I have found that an even higher gluten flour in the actual dough gives the best results for a high-rising, delicate crumb structure. I have had good luck with General Mills All Trumps High Gluten Flour and also when I create my own high gluten flour by adding 8g of vital wheat gluten to 292g of bread flour. This produces the 300g of flour needed for this recipe.
Different brands of bread flour have different gluten content, however, so I made an online Gluten Enrichment Calculator.
The gluten level I recommend in the flour for this recipe is 14.2%. Breadtopia’s bread flour, for example, has 13.5% gluten. My vital wheat gluten contains about 70% protein/gluten (some can be as high as 80%). When I plug those numbers into the calculator and tell it how much enriched flour I want, it tells me how much bread flour and vital wheat gluten to use. For example, for 300g enriched flour with Breadtopia’s bread flour, this is 296g bread flour and 4g vital wheat gluten.
First Dough: Hydration, Mixing and Dough Temperature
Hydration
The first dough is very stiff before you start adding the butter and egg yolks. If you feel it is too stiff for your mixer, try increasing the water in the first dough and decreasing the water in the second dough by the same amount. Note that after incorporating the softened butter followed by the egg yolks, the dough softens nicely, despite its initial stiffness. However, it takes quite a while to incorporate the fats at the beginning.
Mixing
Incorporating the butter and eggs in the initially stiff dough takes a lot of time. Some recipes I have seen blend the softened butter and egg yolks into a smooth emulsion and then introduce them into the first dough together rather than separately. I have tried this, thinking that it might speed the introduction of fats into the first dough, but I’m undecided on whether this helps in any way. Either way seems to work fine.
Dough Temperature
Because incorporating ingredients into both the initial and final doughs does take a long time, you need to pay attention to the dough temperature to make sure it stays in the “target zone” i.e., the dough doesn’t overheat. Check the dough temperature periodically and if it reaches 79F (26 °C), stop mixing and place the mixing bowl, dough and dough hook into the freezer for about 10 minutes to cool them back down, then resume mixing.
Second Dough: Shaping – La Pirlatura
Italian bakers call the technique of shaping the second dough la pirlatura. Here are a couple videos (in Italian) demonstrating the process; the first is Adriano Continisio and the second is Loredana Mesiano:
Timing and Fermentation
As with any other sourdough bread, the rise times will depend on the strength of your starter and the proofing temperature, etc. Your proofing times may not correspond to the timeline I have provided, especially if you do not use a temperature controlled proofing box. (A temperature controlled proofing box works really well for this recipe, especially if you want fairly repeatable proofing times!) Try to let the dough tell you when it is ready. For the first dough, it is when it has tripled in volume (photo above).
For the final proof, it is when the dough has risen to about ½ inch below the top of the paper mold at the edges. Just be patient!
Skewering the Molds
Panettone dough rises quite a bit during the final proof and is enriched with a lot of fats, which leads to a very light and delicate crumb. As such, panettone needs to cool in an inverted position or else it will collapse under its own weight until the starches and fats “set up.” As soon as panettone comes out of the oven you need to insert skewers into the bottom of the molds very quickly, invert the loaves and hang them between two boxes or over some other appropriately sized container. However, I have found that it is very easy to dent the sides of the panettone as you are inserting the skewers when fresh out of the oven. The Wild Yeast Blog suggests inserting the skewers before you place the dough into the molds, and I think this works really well. If your molds + skewers will not fit fully within your baking pan, just make sure you insert the skewers high enough (but not too high!) so that they will clear the sides of the pan without warping the molds or you may get a wonky-shaped panettone.
Toppings
The top of a traditional panettone is scored with a cross and topped with a pat of softened butter placed in the center of the cross just before baking. Fancier versions include other types of toppings. Some of my photos show a topping that I like to use. I suggest that for the first time or two, just make a panettone with the scored cross. Once you master the basic technique, if you would like to try the topping I use, you can find the recipe on the Martha Stewart site here as part of a Gabriele Riva’s panettone recipe.
Tools and supplies
*This recipe makes a little over 1.1kg of dough. If you have different sized panettone molds, you can assess how much dough to put in each mold using the following formula: Calculate the volume of the mold in centimeters and multiply that number by 0.4 or 0.37 to get the grams of dough for your mold. For a mushroom top use 0.4 and for a more recessed panettone, use 0.37. The formula comes from the end of this blog post. This website also lists dough weight for various panettone molds.
Shopping List
Naturally Leavened Christmas Panettone
Naturally leavened panettone is an epic adventure in baking, worth mastering and repeating even outside the holiday season. With this recipe's clear instructions and well-tested strategies, you can enjoy the airy soft crumb and scrumptious fruity flavors of homemade panettone.
Ingredients
Sourdough Starter Refresh your active, 50% hydration sourdough starter as follows:
First Dough
Second Dough
Aromatic Mix
Dried Fruit Inclusions (240g total)
Dried Fruit and Candied Peel Alternative
Instructions
DAY 1 at 8:00 AM
DAY 1 at 10:00 AM
DAY 1 at 12:00 PM and 4:00 PM
DAY 1 at 4:30 PM
DAY 1 at 6:00 PM
DAY 1 at 8:00 PM
DAY 1 at 10:00 PM
DAY 2 at 8:00 AM
DAY 2 at 10:00 AM
DAY 2 at 11:30 AM
DAY 2 at 7:00 PM or later, depending on dough expansion
DAY 2 Immediately after Baking
Naturally Leavened Christmas Panettone