Panettone

Panettone is the hardest thing here by a wide margin, and pretending otherwise does nobody a favour. It needs a stiff live starter fed to a predictable rhythm, two long risings, a dough enriched past the point where most doughs give up, and the discipline to hang it upside down for twelve hours at the end.

The commercial ones are good and cheap. Make this because you want to, not because you need a panettone.

Ingredients

Makes one 1 kg panettone.

First dough, evening of day two

	Metric	Imperial
Strong white flour, W330 or higher	300 g	10.5 oz
Stiff starter, refreshed three times	100 g	3.5 oz
Sugar	90 g	3 oz
Butter, soft	110 g	4 oz
Egg yolks	4	4
Water	130 ml	4.5 fl oz

Second dough, morning of day three

	Metric	Imperial
Strong white flour	75 g	2.5 oz
Sugar	20 g	0.75 oz
Honey	15 g	0.5 oz
Butter, soft	55 g	2 oz
Egg yolks	2	2
Salt	6 g	0.2 oz
Sultanas, candied orange and citron	250 g total	9 oz total
Vanilla	1 pod	1 pod

Method

1. Days one and two. Refresh the starter three times at roughly eight-hour intervals, at 28C. It should triple in four hours by the last refresh. If it does not, stop: the rest will fail and you will have wasted three days of butter and yolks.
2. First dough, evening. Mix flour, water and sugar, add the starter, then the yolks one at a time, then the butter in three additions. Work each addition in fully before the next. Knead until it pulls cleanly from the bowl.
3. Rise at 26 to 28C for 10 to 12 hours, until tripled. Not doubled.
4. Second dough, morning. Add the flour and work until strong again, then sugar, honey, yolks, salt, butter, in that order and one at a time. Fold in the fruit last, briefly.
5. Rest an hour, shape into a ball, drop into the paper mould.
6. Final rise 5 to 7 hours, until the dome reaches about 2 cm below the rim.
7. Cut a cross in the top, put a knob of butter in the middle, bake at 165C, 330F, for 50 to 55 minutes. The centre should read 94C.
8. Skewer it through the base and hang it upside down for at least 12 hours.

What goes wrong

It collapses in the tin. The starter was not strong enough, or the final rise went too far. Panettone is held up by gluten and gas alone; there is nothing else in it to give structure.

The crumb is dense and cakey. The butter went in too fast and broke the gluten network before it could form.

It sinks after baking. You did not hang it. The structure is soft and hot until it has cooled fully, and its own weight will crush it.

The fruit sinks to the bottom. Added too early, or the dough was too slack.

Why it works

The hanging is not superstition. Straight from the oven the starch has gelatinised but not yet set, so the crumb has almost no rigidity and cannot carry its own dome. Inverting it puts that structure in tension rather than compression while it cools, and by the time it is at room temperature the starch has retrograded enough to hold.

At the table

Christmas, and a narrow window either side of it. Panettone appears in shops from late November and is gone by mid-January, and eating one in June would be like finding an Easter egg in August.

It is cut in wedges from the top, like a cake, and eaten at the end of a meal or in the afternoon with something sweet to drink: moscato, a passito, or vin santo further south. Some houses serve it with a mascarpone cream, which is closer to a dessert than a bread and is a modern habit rather than an old one.

It is also currency. Panettoni are given as gifts in quantity through December, which is why every household ends up with more than it wants and why the fortunes of the big producers rest on three weeks of the year.

Pandoro is the other one and the rivalry is real and cheerfully stupid. Pandoro is a star-shaped Veronese cake with no fruit in it, dusted with icing sugar. Households tend to have a position.

What an Italian would say

That the ones with chocolate are for children and the ones with candied fruit are the real thing, an argument nobody has ever won. That it goes with a glass of moscato. And that the good bakers start in October and there is a reason for that.