hello this is chef john from food wishes calm with panettone that's right I'm
very excited to show you my very first attempt ever at making panettone and
I'll admit to being a little bit intimidated because from what I read
this is supposed to be one of the hardest breads in the world to make in
fact one article compared it to climbing Mount Everest which sounds a little
dramatic I mean I don't think there's dozens of people that die each year
making this bread or at least not suddenly but anyway as you'll see this
came out really well so this is either easier than people say or I had a good
amount of beginner's luck but either way let's go ahead and get
started by starting this starter which we're gonna need to make the day before
and we'll do that by mixing some flour and water together to which we're gonna
add some of our already made sourdough starter and we'll go ahead and stir that
together and I hope you have some of that in your fridge but if you don't in
the blog post I'm going to tell you how to make it without it and what we'll do
once that's mixed is go ahead and cover it and just leave it out at room temp
overnight and not only is this mixture gonna add some volume and flavor to our
dough it's also believe it or not gonna help the finish loaf stay fresher longer
and then once that's that we should move on to the other thing we should do the
day before and that would be to soak some chopped up dried fruit and some
type of liqueur okay I'm using white rum and as far as my fruit selection I went
with pineapple cherry and golden raisin but there are so many other things you
could use so feel free to investigate other options you are after all the
james comey of your panettone but anyway we'll go ahead mix that up the night
before and let that fruit absorb the booze stir it occasionally and then once
those two things are set the next day we can actually move on to making the dough
which will begin by dissolving a package of yeast and some very warm but not too
hot water and as usual let that sit for about ten minutes before adding the
following ingredients alright to that we're gonna add a couple eggs as well as
some white sugar we'll also toss in a spoon of pure vanilla extract as well as
some freshly grated orange and lemon zest and then for whatever reason I
decided to take a whisk and give this a mix before adding our starter and flour
you probably don't have to but it's too late now and once I had done that I went
ahead and grabbed my starter from the before which looked beautifully bubbly
and smelled amazing and what we'll do is give that a stir and dump it into our
mixing bowl and like I said if you don't have some sourdough starter don't worry
I'll tell you in the blog post how to make a cheater version but anyway we'll
go ahead and dump that in at which point we'll go ahead and finish this off by
adding our flour and I'm just using all-purpose here although some recipes
do call for bread flour at this point we'll grab our dough hook and start
kneading this in our stand mixer although as soon as I lowered that hook
in I realized I forgot to salt so I stopped and added it because you never
ever want to forget the salt and then what we're gonna do is let this
need for a long time like for ten minutes or so until we've achieved a
very very smooth a very very elastic dough and early on if you need to stop
it and scrape down the sides go ahead but like I said we'll let this knead for
about 10 minutes until we've created something that looks like this all right
like I said very smooth and very elastic and if we pull that deal with our
spatula it should sort of snap back into place and then once that's been
accomplished we'll go ahead and add our room-temperature butter okay ice colds
not gonna work here make sure it's room temp and we're gonna need that for
another five minutes or so or until that butter is completely mixed in and we've
created once again a very smooth very elastic somewhat shiny dough and once
again you might have to turn off the Machine a couple times and scrape down
the sides until it all starts to come together so this is what it might look
like about five minutes later so yes we are talking about a very very soft
somewhat sticky dough here which is probably one of the reasons people say
this is a hard bread to make all right generally people are scared of really
soft dough's but don't be you'll be fine but anyway let me go ahead and transfer
that onto my work surface you can get a better look and then what I did you seen
some slightly damp fingers as well as the help of my bench scraper to sort of
wrestle and fold that a few times into some sort of dough ball shape and by the
way one way you can tell if you've developed enough gluten is you can
stretch it so thin you can see light through it without it tearing which they
call the windowpane test because you're supposed to stretch it out between two
figures in front of a window but I'm not going to because I can tell just by
pinching and stretching like this and then what I did is transfer that back
into my bowl that I didn't even bother cleaning it out I usually do but
didn't feel like it and what we'll do is cover that and let it rise until double
which is gonna take a while okay these rich dough's rise pretty
slowly so mine actually took about three hours which was totally worth a wait if
for no other reason just the feeling you get when you punch it down man that
feels good and what we want to do at this point is transfer that back onto
our table and then once deflated again using some damn fingers in our bench
scraper we will fold that back into some kind of Bala shape because what we're
gonna need to do is transfer this into a plastic bag and refrigerate it overnight
oh yeah we're talking about a three-day bread here alright so if you want this
bread today you have to start it two days ago but anyway trust me you'll be
worth the wait so I went ahead and transfer that into a plastic bag and
popped it in the fridge overnight and by the way we're not just doing this step
to make you wait for nothing alright this overnight fermentation in the
fridge really does improve the flavor and probably texture so I did pop mine
in the fridge overnight and then pulled it out the next morning at which point
it looked like this and what we'll do is go ahead and remove the bag I just rip
it open I know some of you would wash this and reuse it but I don't swing that
way and then what we'll do is go ahead and press this out into some sort of
square rectangle shape and because the dough is nice and cold and that butter
is stiffened up it's a little easier to work with and then once I get it to
about this flatness I'll sprinkle it with a little bit of flour and then roll
it out a little thinner with my rolling pin and the whole reason we're doing
this is it so we can scatter over our boozy dried fruit and then roll this up
and theoretically that way all our fruit will be evenly distributed so I went
ahead and applied my dried fruit to the surface which by now had absorbed all
that rum but I ended up not using it all because as I was doing this I was
thinking man this is like way too much fruit so I actually only ended up using
about three-quarters of it which as you'll see in the final shots probably
wasn't the best idea I probably should used it all but anyway once I was spread
out like I said we'll go ahead and roll the dough up nice and tight and please
accept my apologies for the blurriness see that's one of the reasons I've never
won an Oscar so let's fast forward and then once that's been rolled up I went
ahead and rolled both ends up towards the middle attempting some
how to get it back into some kind of round shape and if at all possible try
to end up with a good amount of dill on the top okay so I sort of work that
around until like I said I ended up with some kind of smooth dough over the top
and then once that's been accomplished what we need to do is transfer this into
a paper or panettone mold which come in this shape the shorter wider one as well
as a tall skinny version and yes of course in the blog post I'm going to
tell you where to find those and then what we'll need to do is cover this and
let it rise until it's at least two thirds of the way up the sides which
because we're starting with cold oh it's gonna take like three or four hours but
don't go buy time go until it looks like this and by the way a few hours in I
took off the plastic because it was touching the top it was kind of sticking
and I got scared you can see the market left right there but anyway the point is
let your dough proof in this mold until it looks like this at which point we
will carefully brush the surface with an egg wash which is one egg beaten with a
splash of water and then once that's been applied to the entire surface we
will take a razor or a sharp knife and cut across into the top about a quarter
to a half inch down which is not just done to make this look really cool
although that's a big part of it we actually need to do that so it rises
properly and we achieved that beautiful signature dome shape so we'll go ahead
and slice the top just like that and then our last official act before this
goes in the oven is to place a small piece of butter right in the middle
which is probably more traditional than practical since I doubt that's gonna
make much of a difference but do it anyway and that's it we are finally
ready to bake so we will go ahead and transfer that into the center of a 350
degree oven for about 40 to 45 minutes or until it looks like this which would
be beautifully browned and spectacularly gorgeous I mean look at that that was so
beautiful I didn't even really care how this tasted and then if you're thinking
hey this is probably ready right now well unfortunately you could not be more
wrong we actually need to let this cool for 2 hours upside down oh yeah you
heard me which is why I'm gonna poke in to skiers on either side
and then flip this over onto a panettone cooling hole which I had cut into my
table but if you don't happen to have access to a panettone cooling hole you
can just flip this over on top of a Dutch oven her stockpot or something
like that and by cooling this upside down there's not going to be any
collapsing and it's going to help us retain a beautiful light texture so take
that gravity and then after somehow waiting for a couple hours for this to
fully cool we will go ahead and pull out those skiers and finally be able to cut
in and see how we did so I went ahead and sliced out a wedge and like I said
this looks so magnificent I really didn't care how it tasted but I'm very
happy to report for a first attempt it tasted really good which didn't really
surprise me what did surprise me was how amazing the texture was for a first
attempt okay was rich and buttery but it was just impossibly light and airy the
only major surprise was where the heck did all that fruit go I thought I had
way too much and ended up thinking I didn't have enough but anyway besides
that I was extremely happy and went ahead and cut another piece so I could
try some with butter which is even a better way to enjoy this and for
whatever reason I found this shape to be more enjoyable than the wedge so I'm
gonna suggest you cut yours in half and then down into slices and while this
bread was great plain and even better spread with butter I'm gonna show you a
third and what I consider ultimate way to enjoy this and that would be lightly
toasted with butter okay that really is the ultimate way to enjoy this bread
preferably with a nice hot cup of coffee but anyway that's it my first attempt at
panettone yes it took three days in many hours but
as far as actual work involved there really wasn't that much and like I said
I was really happy with how this came out although next time I'm gonna add all
the fruit and maybe make a few tweaks which you'll read about on the blog post
but bottom line this was not even close to as hard as people made it out to be
so for that reason and many others I really do hope you give this a try soon
head over to food witch's calm for all the ingredient amounts of more info as
usual and as always enjoy
you