How to Prevent Gaps in Ham Bread
I got a job making holiday bread for a restaurant. The bread is a Venezuelan ham bread called pan de jamon!
It's made with an enriched dough which is rolled out into a rectangle, topped with sheets of sliced ham, diced bacon, raisins, syrup, and olives, then rolled up like a jelly roll and baked. Everything is fine
with it except when it bakes, there is always a big gap between the dough and the fillings. Looks something like this, but with the gaps being a tiny bit wider:
I'm looking for even dough layers and a clean pinwheel cut like this:
How do I achieve more evenly proofed/risen layers and how do I get the ingredients to stick? I've made prosciutto bread for a restaurant before (enriched dough with prosciutto rolled in, then shaped like a baguette, scored and baked) and the prosciutto would melt into the dough, adhering all of the layers together. Don't know what's goin on here!
Any advice would be much appreciated!
but I think I would incorporate all of your ingredients in the dough except for the ham and I would only use one layer of that. Take a look at the pictures, there is less space in the picture with less ham.
I have had success piercing the roll with a meat fork and refrigerating for an hour after letting it sit for an hour on the counter. Hope this helps.
Hi :)
There is a professional way to roll this bread and make the dough and fillings hold together. You can see it here, but it's in Spanish so I'll try to simplify it for you:
- The ham must be at room temperature, it can't be either cold or "sweaty."
-Stretch the dough like a rectangle.
-On one of the long edges place olives (whole).
-Cover these olives with the dough.
-Place the ham on top of the olives and create at least 3 rows. Try to keep them together, so that they are not too far apart.
-Put the bacon diagonally on top
-Spread the raisins
-Finally, roll up from the olive side.
The bread will look like this: the olive right in the middle and the ham close to the dough. It is normal though that the first layer dough is not entirely stick to the ham.