For those of you who are interested in Italian baking, particularly the Italian brioches, these books from Italian Gourmet are worth noting:
Un Panettone Mondiale (with English text): "The stars and all the recipes of the first international national competition on the beloved Italian delicacy".
This is my second bake of the Gallina Limoncello and white chocolate Colomba, by far the best of my four rounds of baking. I learned a lot during these bakes, all of which I will leverage going forward.
This recipe from Luigi Gallina is nicely balanced, relatively easy to work with and is also the most delicious of the ones I've tried. It makes a cloud-like and moist crumb which is also sturdy enough to stand up to being baked in Colomba format.
Good result with this recipe, which includes a tangzhong. I used lemon essence instead of the larger volume of limoncello, and this worked well.
Shaping: I placed dough as one piece in the molds, rather than the traditional wings and body approach. I did this by laminating dough into a diamond shape and rolling it from left and right into the center. This created a batard-like shape, heavier in the center. When place in the mold, I gently reach underneath to spread the dough somewhat toward the wing edges.
For my second round, I made the adjustments based on round 1, and used a different recipe to see the contrast. I developed the LM for about three days, but it was still very active from the series last week.
I added some cocoa powder to the glaze, and baked on a stone in the regular static oven using convection for only the first few minutes.
This time, recipe from Fabrizio Galla, faithfully followed so that I would have a baseline. It is a nice recipe, makes a dough that is easy to work with, and rises well.
Results of my first round of Colomba testing.
I think that results were satisfactory, but I learned several things:
1. Recipe: Colomba is not the same as panettone. I used my current panettone recipe, and the results were almost too soft and airy; Colomba is a long, flat cake, and so it needs a bit of structural integrity to be physically stable. Make sure your recipe isn't extreme in any direction.
I've done 25 panettone bakes this year, according to my records! How the time, and panettone, flies. Looking back on the year, I've studied, taken classes, tried numerous techniques affecting each stage of product. There have been successes and a few (thankfully) failures, bright ideas and "Oops" moments.
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.
This panettone is a pleasing combination of vanilla, caramel and nut flavors, enhanced with bright fruit notes.
Baking panettone is challenging, and can be discouraging, but persistence pays off at breakfast time!
Base recipe is the Mirko Iannarelli formula 72-28%
This batch of caramel apple penettone is the most successful to date - 18 cm high, 1000g exactly. This is the Roy recipe, which is a lower egg yolk formula. My lievito madre has been out of storage for about two weeks.
For the first week, I fed the LM only once a day at 1:1:.40, keeping it at room temp for 12 hours and refrigerated for 12 hours. I found that this had the tendency to increase acidity very slowly, moving me toward target.
Every time I bake panettone, I try to build on what has worked, what I've learned, and new things I want to try out.
This bake is caramel apple; the result is very satisfying: moist, delicate, shreddable, flavored with spices, caramel bits and apple. No off-flavors or acidity.
