Panettone Troubleshooting
Hi everyone! This is my first post here, and I need to say that this forum has been such a huge resource for me in my bread baking endeavors. I'm hoping I might be able to get some help figuring out what went wrong with a panettone I recently made.
Full disclosure: the recipe I used calls for yeast, but I figured this forum is where I'd have the most luck getting an answer. The recipe I used comes from Natasha's Baking, linked here.
Rather than a lievito madre, the recipe calls for an overnight biga. It still includes two mixes and rises, with some differences in order of ingredients and rise times from a LM panettone recipe.
Here's what my final crumb ended up looking like:
This was my first panettone (I want to gain some comfort with this method before I try to figure this out with LM), so I was pretty happy with it. However, it's a bit of a far cry from the lofty loaf I had in mind.
Here a the notes that I hope will give you all the information you'll need to determine where things might have gone wrong.
-I used 80% King Arthur Bread Flour and 20% Paolo Mariani Manitaly flour for the dough. All of the Manitaly was used in the biga. Biga was left ~12 hours at 72F in a covered bowl. The biga tripled (or more) overnight, so I don't believe the issue is with the yeast I was using (Saf-Instant).
-The first mix was taken to the point of dough cohesion, high extensibility and definite windowpane. I used somewhat cold butter, since I was worried about the dough warming up too much during mixing. The dough tripled in size in about 3 hours at 82F. One thing that was weird here that I have never before seen in any bread dough was that the surface of the dough at the end of the rise had a few craters, as if some bubbles had popped near the surface.
-The second mix was slower, since the dough sort of clumped in the paddle. By the end of the mix, it appeared possibly stronger than at the end of the first rise.The additions I used were an equal weight mix of chopped hazelnuts and milk chocolate pieces. There was no issue incorporating the additions, although a few stuck to the bottom of the mixer bowl. I reincorporated those pieces during the preshape. During the preshape, I did not make the dough balls as tight as possible. After the 30 minute rest, the dough had spread out considerably.
At this point I shaped the dough into the tightest ball I could make. It was still rather sticky unless my hands were very liberally buttered.On transferring it into the mold, the side of the dough snagged and got stuck to the inside of the side of the mold, which prevented the ball from losing some tension while being placed.
I assumed since the dough rose well the first time that I should have a fully proofed dough in about 3 hours. By then the dough rouse nearly twice. I turned up the temperature to 86F and waited an hour. There was not a noticeable rise in the dough. At this point, I worried and decided to get the dough baking ASAP. I baked a total of 60 minutes, to an internal temperature of 197F.
I immediately hung to dry for 11 hours, and then placed in a bag. About 12 hours later, I tried it. It was dense and dry (especially near the edges), and the egg flavor was very strong. I also did not love that the hazelnuts were a bit steamed. However, after 3 days, the texture has softened and the flavors have mellowed, and it's much more enjoyable to eat.
Let me know if you have any idea what I could try differently next time to achieve a bit more height and lightness if you think you might have any ideas. Thank you!!!
Hi mirza,
She uses osmotolerant instant yeast in all of her recipes, lean as in pizza and enriched as in croissants, sweetened and unsweetened, SAF Gold yeast, she links to it on amazon in her recipes, and that makes all the difference. The problem is that she does not link to it in every recipe and this leads to misunderstanding.
Examples where she says "instant yeast" in her recipes and links to osmotolerant yeast on amazon: 1, 2, 3
SAF Gold osmotolerant instant yeast has huge gassing power in sweet dough such as this one. That is why her panettone dough rises so much on such minute amounts of yeast and tastes like pannetone, i.e it is well fermented, not bland.
Switch to SAF Gold or similar kind of yeast, osmotolerant instant from other brands, if you wish to bake using Natasha's recipes.
I think you could maybe also keep your ordinary instant yeast, but triple its amount, I am not sure. Your yeast is designed to be used in lean doughs, so in biga that much of your yeast might be too much, but in panettone dough it would be too little, as you discovered from experience.
Her yeast ferments very slowly in lean biga, much slower than yours, and explodes inside super rich pannetone dough. It's a different yeast.
You would have to test bake it, to see how much more of your ordinary instant yeast you need to add to panettone dough (not to biga) in order to lift that dough as it proofs and oven springs in the oven as it bakes to make it look like hers.
Also, you seem to have done everything else just right, mirza. No mistakes on your part. She writes about briochelike texture of this panettone, so your crumb texture looks right - small even pores in the slice.
Thank you so much for the help, mariana!
I've been baking bread for a quite some time now, and am only just now learning that different kinds of yeast can have such a profound effect on the way the bread turns out. I don't think there's anything quite like baking bread for a healthy, regular dose of humility!
-Mirza
Nice to meet you, Mirza! I agree that lessons in breadbaking are neverending lessons in humility. That makes bread baking a challenging profession and a fun hobby as well.
Take this loaf as a demo of limits of your current yeast, of what it can and cannot do. I had the same troubles once when baking exceedingly eriched buns using my favorite dry yeast - active dry yeast. It was a disaster. Their gassing behavior in time was nowhere near needed by the recipe and the buns tasted like wood, dry and tasteless, horrible. It took me several bakes to eventually succeed. To adapt this recipe to my yeast!
I think I only learned from it that we are not supposed to use ingredients not designed for certain tasks. ADY and regular IADY works best when there is up to 10%sugar in dough. Forcing it to work in intensely sweet environment is simply torturing those yeast cells. Not fair to them or to us.