Toffee Pecan Panettone
With Callebaut Gold and white chocolate.
This is the highest-rise panettone I've baked yet, due in part to some changes in the way I'm maintaining the lievito madre, and some alterations I'm making to the recipe to improve the first impasto.
The crumb is soft, moist, lofty, shreddable. There is no trace of acidity, or of toughness, dryness or other common problems. The flavor comes from 1. mellow complexity from the 12-hour rise on first impasto (which tripled in exactly 12 hours at 22-24C), the Vanilla, toffee, pecans, and chocolate.
The gluten was maintained in very good shape going into the second impasto, which was the first hint at the quality of this batch. It had lots of strength and stretch at this point:
Based on the strength of this, I went ahead and used King Arthur Galahad for the second impasto. This was to permit a freer final rise and oven spring. Mixing went well and produced an extensible dough that was non-sticky and cleared the mixer bowl:
Dough rested 30 min, preshaped and rested for another 30 min, then final shaped and raised for 4 hours at 28C.
Glazed and baked to 94C internal temperature to ensure doneness while preserving texture/quality. Inverted overnight to set.
Comments
This is an amazing Panatoni! Congrats!
Dang that looks good!!! Congrats Sue! Your perseverance is paying off.
May I ask what are those new changes you are doing to your Lievito? I'm following Luigi Gallina's maintenance, and my lievito looks better, triples in size, has a yogurish smell, finally getting confident enough to bake panettone again.
My last batch, pH was better, it's the second impasto where is kinda hard to get to the point where gluten develops properly, I'm so afraid to overmix it and that the gluten structure collapses...
Anyway, SO happy to see you having fun baking!
JC
Hi JC!
Thank you, and I am looking at LM maintenance as something that has to organically fit into your life. I am making use of sugar *some* of the time, to boost yeast activity in the LM. This approach is being investigated by @sourbakernz on Insta, using differing Cu% and comparing results. I have found that there is a benefit in changing up approaches intermittently, too. I'm primarily only refreshing once/daily while in short term maintenance mode, and not at a cold temp, but at around room temp with occasional warmer and cooler periods. Previously I believe I had been doing too much cool maintenance, which was favoring bacteria over yeasts. Between bakes I am storing the LM bound and quite cold. I'm being more careful with doing maintenance feeds at 40% hydration and not 45 or more, as the yeast seems to do better at 40.
I'm watching the Cu% on the first impasto, too. Looking at the comparisons between various recipes in Chambelland, I was wondering whether the lower Cu% 1st impasto recipes were compensating for a weak LM, don't know. Analyzing the recipe I've been using, I found it was on the low side, and so I redistributed the sugar so that it is rather higher in the 1st than the 2nd impasto. This is what I believe gave me the batter result this time.
Hope this helps, though everyone's LM and situation is different of course!
Your LM looks very nice, why not do a small test bake?
Regards, Sue
That is such an outstanding achievement, really incredible Sue.
Benny
I think outstanding *may* be overstating it, lol, but 😊 thank you! I like the "always learning" aspect of panettone baking!
--Sue
It would seem that we are running out of superlatives :-)
Amazing bake.
I'm hoping to get more people interested in baking panettone, because it is just so delicious.
I already have several more things to try next time, which is part of the fun.
regards, Sue
That's a beauty, Sue. Toffee and Pecan? Sounds delicious!
Up to your usual high standards. Top notch bake.
After I posted this, I started on the next series of planned experiments.... I would say that I am maybe a year away from getting the results that I really want. Meanwhile, this is a delicious panettone, so we aren't suffering!
regards, Sue