The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Who doesn't love O sole mio....

greedybread's picture
greedybread

Who doesn't love O sole mio....

For some reason, I always think of that song when I think of Venice:)

It is one of the most requested songs for Gondaliers to sing ......

Mmmm Veneziana

Yet it is a Neapolitan song.

But this lovely beauty is all Venetian!! It's a Veneziana.

A Venetian version of Pandoro perhaps or a Panettone, as the dough is similar but without the fruits.

Definitely a festival bread and it does take a little effort but WELL worth it.

So shall we get yeasty??

The full story....

You will need!!

STAGE 1:

4 tsps of dried yeast

1/4 cup of sugar

3/4 c warm water

3 egg yolks

2 cups of Strong bakers flour

75 g of softened butter.

Stir the sugar into the warm water and then stir in yeast until dissolved.

Allow to stand for 10 minutes until frothy.

Add in the egg yolks and combine well.

Add in the flour and this should form a soft dough.

Lastly add in butter and combine through the dough well.

Place in a bowl and over tightly and leave for 2 hours.

Lovely top of the Veneziana

STAGE 2:

 1 Tbsp of honey

3 tbsp of warm water

1/2 cup of sugar

3 egg yolks

1 cup plain flour

1 cup Bakers flour

 120g of butter

2 tsp of Vanilla essence

Grated zest of 2 Oranges

Grated zest of 1 lemon

Pinch of Salt.

Stir honey into warmed water, stir in the sugar and egg yolks.

Add this mix to the spongey mix and mix until smooth.

Stir in flour, 1 cup at a time until a soft dough forms.

Stir in the vanilla, zests, butter and salt.

Knead for about 8 minutes or use dough hook for 8 minutes on slow.

The dough should be soft but slightly sticky.

Place dough in lightly oiled bowl, cover and leave to rise for 2 hours.

Veneziana dough...1st rise

Stage 3:

Remove dough from bowl and place on lightly floured surface.

Punch it down and knead lightly for a few minutes.

Cut into half or leave as one monster dough as mine is above.

Place each ball (or single) in a well-greased high sided round cake tin.

Cover and leave for 3 hours.

Preparing the topping for the Veneziana

Stage 4:

For the topping you need:

1/4 cup of almond meal or ground almonds.

12 whole almonds

3/4 cup of granulated sugar

2 egg whites

icing sugar

1/2 cup of coffee crystals(or the Italian sugar pellets if you have them!!)

Pre heat oven to 200 Celsius.

Mix the almond meal and sugar together.

Beat the egg whites until frothy and lightly fold in the almond/ sugar mix.

Spread this on top of the dough (as above)

Place the 12 almonds over the top of the dough.

Sprinkle the coffee crystals and then lightly sift 1/4 of a cup over the top of this.

Topping all on....

Please note, my topping does not have the whole almonds on it as that would have been pushing my luck.

Almond meal, I can sneak in, but those beady eyed boys would not tolerate the whole almonds ...

Place in the oven and bake for 15 minutes and then lower the heat to 175 Celsius and bake for a further 40 minutes.

Possibly less time, 25-30  if you have two smaller loaves.

Remove from oven when golden brown and cool for ten minutes.

Carefully remove from the mold and allow to cool fully before eating.

When it is FINALLY cool, slice a piece and ENJOY, ENJOY , ENJOY!!

http://greedybread.wordpress.com/2012/09/29/who-doesnt-love-o-sole-mio/

Cooling on the rack....
Have a slice or three..

Recipe adapted from the ever wonderful Carol Field's "The Italian Baker" 2ed, 2011.

Comments

Isand66's picture
Isand66

Fantastic looking bread/cake/ I'm now hungry again!

Some of your photos are not showing up at the end though, so you might want to check that out.

Ian

greedybread's picture
greedybread

me, too....I am always hungry hence the eternal baking of bread!!

hmmm. i know the photos take a bit of time to come through on here....

Just checked and seemed ok?

Can it differ from browser to browser?

 

 

Isand66's picture
Isand66

Must have been my browser.  They look fine now.  I think the computer gods were angry with me for some reason.  Yesterday nothing I did seemed to work!

Our Crumb's picture
Our Crumb

Perhaps this is the appropriate opportunity to point out that the images that both you, Ian, and Greedy, upload to TFL are at about 20x the resolution than they need to be.  I enjoy posts from both of you, but waiting for your images to download can try (sometimes to the breaking point, depending on how small my TFL-viewing downtime window is) my patience and bandwidth, even at work where the pipeline is huge, but especially at home with our cell modem/wifi connection.   I assume you are uploading these ~4MB jpegs directly as your camera processes them.  May I humbly suggest that you lower this barrier to our enjoying your wonderful products and presentations @TFL by passing these images through a tool that will reduce them to perfectly adequate sizes of ~200 kb (the max I aim for, for those I upload to TFL).  Photoshop's go-to tool for this is "Save for web and devices" in the File menu.  On my Mac, Preview does this too.  I'm sure whatever platform you use has a tool to do this, not to mention your camera itself (pre-set to lower res or post-process and "save as").

I'm sure others would appreciate more instant gratification when they click to see your latest creations as well!

Cheers,

Tom

Isand66's picture
Isand66

Actually Tom, all of my photos are resized in photoshop to 1 meg or less.  I place them in my other blog and copy the entire post over to this one.  I have never had any one complain that the photos were taking too long to load so I'm surprised you are having issues.  I have downloaded my posts on my phone using the cellular speed and have had no issues as well.

Regards,
Ian

Our Crumb's picture
Our Crumb

Seems I recall dragging one or more of your images off onto my desktop after a particularly slow screen fill and getinfo said they were large.  But -- could also have been a bandwidth constriction elsewhere.  I'm not exactly an IT guy.  Never mind then!

Cheers,

Tom

 

greedybread's picture
greedybread

will do for her in future...

I do with many but sometimes i don't but will remember to do so:)

hope you enjoy the bread:)

greedybread's picture
greedybread

know that feeling!!