Panettone round two

Guess what everyone's getting for Christmas?

For round two I made this panettone which was originally by Jim Lahey. The recipe is very different from the previous one.  The Beranbaum one calls for a total of 5 egg yolks. Yes, just yolks. I tried my hand at amaretti to use up the whites but perhaps multiplying the recipe by 5 is a little too much.

This recipe uses only 3 whole eggs, which is great because there are no leftovers and it's cheaper!
I was worried it might make the dough dry though, because when you're about to add 10+ tablespoons of butter to something you worry about these things.

This recipe also omits the bigga starter and just goes straight to the mixing. There is only 1/2 tsp of yeast and it rises (I should say ferments) for 15 hours outside the fridge!  So less active time, no trying to find room in the fridge, but possibly less flavour?  (My house is pretty cool so it actually took about 18 hours, which was perfect for me)

I tried to divide the dough to make
two smaller ones.
Should've used a scale.

Of course me being me, I can't leave anything as is, so I used instant yeast instead of the active dry yeast the recipe called for, because it was just supposed to go straight into the flour and I didn't want it to have little yeast balls in it.

I also used only chestnuts (I still had some from the last batch) and ginger soaked for two days in Benedictine and Grand Marnier. Instead of leaving a whole vanilla bean in the mix I used a combo of vanilla extract (although I suspect paste or fresh seeds would be best) orange zest and about a tsp of the soaking liquid.

The bottom of the
leaning tower of panettone
got a little extra dark

The Beranbaum recipe also said to cool the bread on a pillow (?) to protect the crust while it cooled.  I was unsure what this meant.  What kind of pillow?  The Lahey recipe recomended the traditional upside-down hang if you use the traditional paper pans (which I also did not buy in time... maybe next year).  I was worried about hanging without the paper pans, but I figured this is a test, so I may as well... test it out?

It totally worked, guys.


So that's what I did, but how did it compare?  Well, the texture of the dough was way way looser this time, which was great. The texture of the actual bread doesn't look very different but it is closer to the fragile, pull- apart-in-sections quality that I was looking for. The flavour is sweeter, which is good because one of the complaints from the last one was that it needed more sugar. It tastes less fermented but that's not to say it tastes bland or simple. It tastes good, like a panettone, which is what I'm going for here.

Look at the colour difference in this picture! The very yellow slice is from the 5 yolk Beranbaum version. The white "loaf" is the top half of the leaning tower of panettone.

The Bread Bible recipe is a very good recipe but it's just too brioche-like for me to be really happy with it. The Lahey recipe is simpler and creats a bread far more like a panettone than unlike one.

Now I just have to make a double batch for Christmas!  After this I may be happy never to see another panettone ever again.


Or I just may make one every Christmas forever and ever amen.