Easy Italian Panettone Recipe - Holiday Recipes | Posh in Progress (2024)

FAQs

What is the best Italian flour for panettone? ›

Special Mention: Italian Manitoba Flour

Manitoba wheat is usually ground into either type 00 or type 0 flour and used for baked goods that require a slow-rising process. For type 00, this would be Italian Panettone and Colomba cakes, German krapfens, or French croissants.

Panettone is famous for its tangy flavor and yellow, soft and gooey dough that is unlike no other. The secret behind it is an Italian yeast called lievito madre, or mother yeast. But it's not an easy yeast to work with: you need time and patience to master it.

During Christmas time, Italians enjoy the famous panettone, a fluffy dome-shaped bread studded with candied fruit.

Make sure to proof the dough in an insulated environment, like an oven (as directed). This will keep the dough away from cold and draft, which may stall the yeast from working its magic.

The Bite/N mixers are perfect for particularly hydrated types of dough that are used to make baguettes, sliced bread, and breadsticks, for example, but also pastries such as croissants, panettone, and brioches.

Your dough can become sticky when you add too much water or the flour isn't suitable for the type of dough you are making. Over proofing or fermenting the dough can also result in the gluten structure weakening causing sticky dough.

Panettone tends to be a little more expensive than most other baked goods, mainly due to the amount of time that goes into making each one. A traditional panettone is usually a lengthy procedure, however, a cheap mass-produced alternative will take shortcuts in the baking process which will be reflected in its taste.

While no sourdough baking processes can be considered “simple”, panettone is definitely takes complications to the extreme, with an unusual levain maintenance method (“pasta madre”, or mother dough), two dough builds (the “primo” and “secondo impastos”), and the necessity for exacting temperature and pH control ...

It has a texture akin to sandwich bread, in that when you compress it between your fingers it can be molded into Play-Doh-esque forms. It's porous and slightly sour, a flavor it derives from the intense fermenting process it undergoes before it hits the oven. It is labor-intensive and prohibitively difficult to bake.

VINO. No Italian dish is complete without wine – not even panettone! We suggest serving it alongside a glass of Moscato d'Asti. Sweet and sparkling, this bubbly wine is great for holiday toasting and compliments the citrus and yeasty flavors of the panettone.

What is the best Italian panettone in Italy? ›

In Milan there are artisanal bakers making the best iteration of panettone you're likely to encounter. Probably the most famous is Pasticceria Cucchi, founded in 1936 (pasticceriacucchi.it).

For example, thickly spread with rich Piemontese chocolate & hazelnut spread or simply buttered and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar for a festive twist. Other Italian speciality spreads such as crema al caffé (coffee cream) and crema di pistachio (pistachio cream) are also luxurious toppings ideal for toasted panettone.

Since the dough is very rich, but also very airy, it tends to collapse and deflate as soon as it cools. For this reason, traditional panettone is skewered with a special rack right when it comes out of the oven, and immediately hung upside down for 8 hours to cool and rest.

The panettone should last up to five days, though it tends to be a bit drier after a day or two. I have never seen a scrap left after the first day. You can also wrap it in plastic and then foil, and freeze it for up to two months.

Chill in the fridge for 2 to 3 hours before serving. If all else fails, you can revive the stale panettone by placing slices in a baking dish, sprinkling with a little water or milk, and baking until warmed through.

Italian mills will usually sell flour based on what its purpose is for. For long fermented doughs such as panettone the flour will be '00' but with a stronger gluten content than the '00' flour they'll sell for pizza or pasta making. An all-purpose flour can also be '00'.

Basic Ingredients 00 wheat flour (AKA farina di grano tenero 00) is an imported Italian flour. It is an excellent choice for making artisan breads, particularly those involving sourdough and long fermentation processes.

For cookies, bars, cakes/cupcakes, biscuits, scones, or anything that needs a tender crumb, use Farina di grano tenero, 00. This is your “cake flour.” Nobody wants a chewy cake.

Grano duro is slightly yellow, more granular, and more commonly used for pasta and some breads in the south of Italy. It's also knows as durum wheat flour. Grano tenero is generally what we think of as white flour, and is more broadly used in bread, pizza, and pastry, and northern pasta doughs.