Panettone is a traditional Christmas bread, according to MSBH. It’s basically a brioche made with colorful dried fruits. Brioche isn’t my favorite to eat, but I cannot think of a better smelling bread to bake at home. All that butter – it’s really something. And it does make great toast.
This yeast bread had eggs, milk, and a heapton of butter. The yeast and sugar and stuff is mixed with the eggs and milk along with water and vanilla.
Then the wet ingredients are mixed together at top speed with the butter and flour for “9 minutes.” Not 8, not 10, but 9 minutes. The dough becomes very delicious smelling and stringy.
Any dried fruits can be used and the MSBH suggests using candied citrus peel to make it a more traditional Italian Christmas bread. I used what I had on hand: dried cranberries, golden raisins, and currants.
These are mixed in and the dough is allowed to rise in a buttered bowl until doubled in size. This took HOURS. Hours and hours and hours. Then finally, it was ready to portion.
The MSBH suggests using metal Panettone molds but I don’t own any. Instead of investing in them, I opted to order paper Panettone molds and I could not be happier with how they worked out. For six bucks I got six molds. I used three for this recipe – just dividing the dough up evenly among the three molds.
The dough is very soft and pliable and instead of worrying too much about rolling each loaf, I just plopped it into the mold. It then rises until it just peaks over the lip of the mold.
This second rise only took about an hour. The bottom loaf didn’t have as much dough as the other two so it never made it up to the top.
Then they’re scored on top and baked for about an hour. I had to tent each loaf with foil after the first 20 minutes because the tops got so dark so fast.
Here they after baking. I removed the paper mold from one to show the full loaf.
The paper molds came with clear plastic bags so that each loaf could be wrapped. That was a great surprise – finding attractive wrapping materials for baked goods is more difficult than one would think. But this was delightful – I added the green ribbon and off the extra loaves will go as gifts.
I was just wondering if you had to prepare the pans. Grease or flour?
I was wondering before I use mine.
Thanks
Pat
I don’t remember exactly, but because I used the paper Panettone molds I think I just sprayed them lightly with pan spray. Certainly no grease/butter or flour was used.
where did you get the paper molds?! i also have the baking handbook and i love it! in the recipe it says to preheat the oven to 400degrees and let it bake in there for 15min at 400 degrees. the only paper molds i’ve seen are at sur la table and those are only oven safe up to 390 degrees….
Here’s the link for the molds: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FRXI0C/ref=oss_T15_product
They did fine at 400 degrees.
Happy baking!
My daughter uses brown paper lunch bags. They are a lot less expensive.