A Slice of Pannettone

A Slice of Pannettone
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I got into baking mode late in 2008 due to my little thumb injury. However once I got going, I did get a bit adventurous and decided it was worth trying to bake bread again.

As you can see from the picture above, I baked the Italian festive bread: a pannettone. I baked it old fashioned style ie without the commercial high fluted pannettone moulds that give it its characteristic shape and incredible lightness. Since I lacked that mould, I simply used whatever came to hand in my kitchen which is pretty much how your average Italian housewife would have done it before the advent of that famous mould and the commercially baked ones.

The result: a flatter, slightly more dense bread but still a great texture and taste with the little orange peel bits and zest. I also ran out of lemons so no lemon zest but being it still worked very well with orange substitute. It does take a while as most breads do with 2 risings but is otherwise reasonably easy to make and very rewarding to eat. The rapidity with which the two pannetones disappeared was clear testament to its tastiness.

Gubana

I'd been wanting to do something special to mark Easter Sunday other than attending the Easter Vigil mass. So this year I decided to bake an Italian Easter bread called Gubana. Gubana is from a region east of Venice called Friuli, near the what used to be Yugoslav and Austrian borders. It's a briochelike dough rolled up like a strudel with a nut and dried fruit filling and twisted itself around like a snail then baked.

The recipe I used came from a book by Carol Field called "The Italian Baker". It's an excellent book and I've had good results from recipes I've tried in the past. And twisted doughs have always appealed to my inner aesthetic cook. So out I went on holy Saturday morning with my shopping list of ingredients.

As our domestic helper is always wanting to learn things new in the kitchen I decided she could do the dough and I would do the filling and walk her through the process. So I showed her the recipe and told her she could either use the electric mixer or knead it with her hands. She chose the mixer with the dough kneaders.

The process took the whole afternoon but of course much of that time was spent doing other things while waiting for the risings to take place. The fruit (mainly rasins and candied peel and lemon zest) and nuts (walnuts, hazelnuts) was mixed with a mixture of different liqueors and spirits so it tasted wonderful on its own. The filling was spread on the rolled out dough rather like spreading jam onto a swiss roll and then rolled up. The additional step was then to roll up again to form a round snail, wait for it to rise again then pop it in to bake in the oven.

The result was great when freshly baked but I was on the whole a bit disappointed with what it tasted like the next day. It was nice enough, but nothing to rave about. The fruit filling while it tasted great before being baked lost a lot of its nuance afterwards so I'd personally adjust the recipe to include more raisins and more liqueor.

As it doesn't have any artificial preservatives, it doesn't retain its freshness well although it keeps so it greatly benefits from toasting from the next day onwards. I felt that while it tasted nice enough, it could have been kneaded more to create a greater elasticity in the final bread plus maybe bread flour rather than all purpose flour would also help to that end. But it is actually meant to be a dense bread, so maybe the texture wasn't wrong, just that I prefer my bread slightly softer although I still like chewy textures. However while I grumble, you may notice that the only picture I managed to take is on the second day when most of the bread had already been eaten or given away. So it was certainly edible enough to get eaten fairly quickly and distracting enough for me to forget to photograph it freshly baked.

Overall verdict: interesting but not rave-worthy