Panettone: The ChefSteps one-day recipe for this Italian holiday bread

Upside down bread, aka panettone. Panettone, when done right, is like brioche meets fruit bread had a baby with a cloud. It's buttery, it's rich, it's fruity, so fluffy and so light and so airy. It's amazing. Do they look upside down from your angle? I can't wait to talk about why they're upside down. When are we gonna get to that part? Everything we're gonna walk through with getting our perfect panettone is all about getting air in there and getting air and more air and more air and fluffier and fluffier and fluffier. It's the only baked good I can think of that gets bigger after it's baked. So panettone is a pretty classic Italian bread. You usually only see it around the holidays. A really good panettone can take days to make. You have a day just to make the dough, a couple days for fermentation. The, like, benchmark out there is Roy. All he does is panettone. He's the master at it. So what we're gonna try to do is try to get as close as we can to, say, that gold standard panettone in less than a day. I think we can do it. In fact, I know we can do it. It's gonna be pretty darn good. This is the Roy panettone, and you can see it looks like a cute little loaf of bread. Really pretty. Like, if you make brioche and this happens to your brioche, you're like, oh, dang it. Like, my brioche has all these holes in it. But this is what we want with panettone. So the way we're gonna ferment it is about getting air into it. The way we're gonna fold it and knead it is about capturing and trapping air into it. The way we're gonna bake it is about holding onto that air. This is where the upside-down part comes in. So it's all those things combined that are gonna give us the fluffiest, lightest bread. Upside-down bread. If you don't have a sourdough, you can learn how to make one at ChefSteps. I feel like a lot of folks watching this video probably have a sourdough or have a friend with a sourdough, so sourdough starter, so you should be fine. That's a nice, happy starter. Whistles Tangy. OK, buttermilk. A lot of recipes you'll see for panettone, a lot of breads just use water. Present concept for sure. Water's gonna be better at developing gluten, which does hold onto moisture and help develop gluten a little bit better. But I want that kind of, like, tart acidicness too. A little bit of the flour. Yeast. I'm just gonna give it a little mix here. This is gonna jumpstart our whole... dough. Hydrate a little bit of the flour, feed some of the yeast, feed the sourdough starter. That buttermilk and that sourdough is, like, already tangy and flavorful. Off to a good start. You really just want to make sure the yeast is hydrated, make sure it's dissolved. So right now it's just kind of, like, a shaggy, tough dough. In another hour or so, it's gonna start to fluff up and get puffy on you, which is what we're looking for. Let's see what it looks like. Dun-dun-dun-dun! So this is what you want it to look like. You can let this part hang out too long, you know, just like a sourdough bread. If you let it hang out too long, it's gonna die on you. You want to catch it when it's, like, at its puffiest. So you can see this same exact guy in about an hour or so. It's gonna look like this. Maybe even, like, 30 minutes. Really depends on the temperature. All right, part one, we're off to a good start. We've got our biga going. And you can see, nice and puffy. Next step is we're just gonna finish the dough. So more flour, egg yolks, egg yolks, egg yolk, egg yolks. This is where kind of the brioche part of it comes in. Egg yolks are emulsifier. They're also gonna help make the bread just a little bit more rich. It's what's gonna help us hold on to a lot of that butter. So you can see it's nice and fluffy. This is, like, really, really nice stuff. So yolks go in. You want a nice, high-protein, like, a really fine, high-protein bread flour. You need a lot of protein to hold on to all the fat, all the butter, all the egg yolks, all the sugar. This is, like, the structure of our entire dough here. So this is where we start to really develop gluten, hydrate the gluten, develop the gluten. That's what's gonna hold on to all that air. From here, we're just kind of adding, you know, what you call inclusions or modifiers. Like, sugar's gonna tenderize it. Butter's gonna tenderize it. So if I don't add sugar and I don't add butter, it can be, like, as tough as, like, a baguette almost, you know? Really, really chewy, really, really tough. Some recipes, you can just add everything into the bowl all at once. One, you'd, like, smash up your fruit, so it'd just end up getting pureed into there instead of having, like, specks. So working backwards from that, you add the garnish last. The more moisture we have right now for the flour, that's also giving the gluten a jumpstart to develop. So if I start adding butter and sugar, that immediately starts shortening the gluten and getting in the way of the gluten from developing. Generally, salt's gonna add flavor, but it's gonna retard the yeast, so you wait till the end, right? If we had no salt, we're not gonna taste even the aromas that much. Boom. Gotta make sure you're scraping down your dough, scraping down the bowls, making sure it's all getting mixed in. I might even need a wood spoon for that. It's a little stiffer. Oh, yeah. Getting sticky. That's good. Is that a good stretch? Not quite there. That's, like, gluten starting to wake up. So this is one of those steps where... if you wanted really stretchy, really elastic dough, this is where you'd kind of want to wait and hang out, too. Like, you could let this sit, you know, for several hours, and that gluten's just gonna develop even further, which is gonna be good, because it's gonna hold on to a more elastic bubble. But there's a fine line between going too long, and, like, I want a panettone loaf today, remember? We're gonna, like, try to get this done today, so... Let's keep going with the mixing. Looking really good, though. For this recipe, I'd stay away from adding a bunch of, like, vanilla extract. There's just more alcohol, and that's just gonna make your bread even more tender than it needs to be, and it's gonna take away from bubbles that are gonna be trying to hold on to air. So we're using fresh vanilla. Salt's no-brainer. So salt goes in. Sugar's gonna tenderize the dough. It's gonna make it sweeter, obviously, but it's also gonna tenderize it. Sugar goes in. Want some fresh vanilla bean, just because we like it. If you can't get it, get vanilla paste. Get ground vanilla. Get vanilla powder. Mmm. It's nothing like vanilla, man. I'm gonna mix this up a little bit, then we'll get into our essential oils. I'm just gonna give the sugar and vanilla and salt a head start in the dough. Mmm. Yep, well, that's because of the sugar. The sugar's dissolving, it's becoming liquid, and it's softening and shortening up the dough. We love essential oils. Essential oils are frickin' amazing. One of the reasons they're amazing is because they're super, super concentrated flavors from some of your favorite, like, fruits and herbs and spices, right? I'm gonna guess, I have no idea, but it took hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pounds of red mandarins to make this bottle. You store it in a dark bottle in your fridge, it'll last a very, very long time, like, years. So, very strong. We're gonna add red mandarin oil. This is where sensitive scales are really handy. That's 1.8 grams. Boop. That goes in. That's insane. Super, super aromatic. What you don't want to do is take a bunch of red mandarin and then stick it in the lemon or stick it in the mint one. You never want to do that. That's how you wreck a good batch of dough or a good weekend of cooking. Lemon essential oil. That's 0.4. Strong stuff, a lot of flavor. So, we're on our way. We're pretty much, like, have a brioche almost. We're about to add butter in just a minute, but the dough's starting to look quite a bit different, right? The gluten's relaxing and hydrating. The sugar's thinning it out. Essential oils are alcohol oils, so they're actually kind of enriching the dough and slacking out the dough, too. Looking real pretty. You can see how shiny, smooth it is. It's ready for butter. If we just throw our butter in right off the bat, you're just going to mix and mix and mix and mix and mix and it's never going to emulsify. So, you need to get that development of the gluten first, which you can see we have here when it starts to get ribbony, stretchy, smooth. Then you can really start to emulsify the butter in. If you really want to be careful with it, too, you can do, like, a knob at a time. It'll come back together as, like, one homogenous elastic dough when it's ready. When you're starting to throw butter in there, you're shortening the gluten, and not only that, it's like if it wraps around a ball of dough, now that one ball of dough is covered in butter, it's not mixing with the other one. It's actually pretty obvious when you start looking at it, but at the end of the day, you've got to get all our butter in there and it should look like a nice, smooth, cohesive dough. That's when you know you've got it. It shouldn't look shredded or torn or anything like that. The other thing, too, is this butter's room temp. Ice-cold butter is not going to really mix in that well, and you don't want to melt it. Last little chunk. Let's stop for a second. We're not quite there yet, and one of the things you know that you're not there is because the sides of the mixer still have a lot of dough, have a lot of grease on them. So I'm going to scrape this down. And just... We'll keep mixing. We're pretty much there, but... Cool. All right, check it out. Look at this. Super elastic, soft, smooth, well on our way to some really nice panettone. This is good stuff. Before I throw my bits in there, I'll let it relax just for a second, because if I throw them in right now, it's not so tense, the gluten, that it's just going to kind of resist the little fruits and stuff. So I'll let it chill for maybe just a minute. We're going to add that, like, fruit bread part, right? Breadfruit, fruit bread. Here's where all the candies come in. You can pretty much add anything you want if you stick to about, like, 20% or so volume of the dough, and whatever you're putting in is super low moisture. Even though it's all tender and chewy and sticky, the candied orange, super low moisture. These cherries, even though they're wet with alcohol, technically it's low moisture, right? It's just made soft with sugar. Those things go in, you mix it up, and you're done. Let's do it. Whoa! Those are good. Not really a right or wrong way to do this. Just get it in there. This is one part I think folks may goof up. It's not like adding chocolate chips to cookie dough where you're like, ooh, just put it in and barely mix it. If I stop right here, you'll see all these bits of fruit are just falling, they're not sticking. It's still kind of rinsing off some of the oils, rinsing off some of the alcohol on the fruit. So I want to keep going until they're really embedded in there and they're really holding on to it. And that'll be kind of the difference of when I cut open my panettone in the end, all the fruit's kind of, like, sunk to the bottom or it's on the edges versus evenly dispersed too. I want to make sure that fruit gets nice and sticky into the dough. Ah, it smells so good. I'll take a pause, look at it. Still not quite there. This is, like, perfect. Exactly what we're looking for here. See all this fine gluten film like that? That's lovely. Oh, my God. It looks like Laffy Taffy. It's like fruit bread Laffy Taffy. So good. On to the bulk fermentation. So it's going to relax, it's going to hang out, the gluten's going to keep developing, it's going to become a little bit more tender and relaxed, and that's going to allow us to get a couple folds in there, trap some air. It is kind of proofing as well, you know. It's going to come out a lot bigger, softer, airier, more tender. Depends on how cold, how warm. It's going to relax, slack out, and, like, double in volume. So I'm going to keep this covered, wrap it up, sit it on the counter. That's it. All right, we are getting close here. Beautiful dough, beautiful bulk fermentation. Should be nice and soft. Ooh, see it starts to slack out. You can see the bottom of it. Got some nice big air bubbles in there. That's a happy dough. Now, you can, if you really wanted to, pick it up, go straight in the mold, that's going to be great. But what I found, and this is part of, like, trying to get a really great panettone in a day, I'm going to put it out on some smooth surface. Could be a big sheet pan, could be a metal countertop. I've got a piece of marble here. Something smooth, not like wood, that's going to suck moisture out of it. And then we're going to just get a couple folds, try to trap some air in, let it rest. A couple more, try to trap some air in. Then we're going to go to the mold, then we're going to bake. This is just what I like to use. You can use olive oil, whatever you want. I'm even going to hit that guy. Your hands are going to get oily. It's good, it's fine. Look at that, see, that's good. Whoa, see those bubbles? Yes! That's a good sign there. Oh, this bubble, so nice. Couldn't be happier with this dough so far. Oily hands, and yeah, I'm going to lose some bubbles here at first, but we'll actually win overall if we do this fold right. So one thing to keep in mind, you're not kneading, because you'll just bang out more bubbles than you'll keep. But if I stretch the dough a little bit, make sure it's relaxed, fold the dough over, I'll capture even more bubbles. If you really want, you can rotate it a bit. If you find that the dough's kind of tightening up, leave it alone. It should really want to be folded and want to be stretched. Hit this guy, hit this guy, and I'll just let it hang out for a few minutes. And all I'm doing right now is letting the gluten relax. It might come apart a little bit, that's fine, and I'm just going to repeat this process 2-3 times. If I'm kneading the dough, I'm squeezing the bubbles out. If I'm just laying the dough on top, I'm going to kind of squeegee the air out, but what you want to do is lay the next layer on and capture it like a little pillow, right? You'll see it's relaxed a bit, and it'll be even easier to fold again. So just repeat this process 2-4 times, depending on how much air you feel like you can get in the dough. But I think this one's looking so good, I'll stop at 2. All right! That's a pretty thing. I feel like it wouldn't be panettone without these giant paper molds. You can go from dough to bake to serving, slice through the mold even. One thing you have to consider, maybe at this stage, is how I'm going to go from the oven to pretty much immediately upside down somewhere. You can stab skewers like this through the bottom of the mold. That way when it comes out of the oven, you put these on the backs of chairs, on the backs of some buckets or big pots, and it hangs upside down, right? You've just got to get it upside down, supported by the bottom of the mold. However you can do that. You can't put it upside down and set it down because it's going to collapse. It doesn't matter if it's right side up or right side down. You want it to hang upside down, right? Like a lot of things you'll bake, you'll see it sink as it cools a little bit. But if you invert it in enough time, it'll stretch out even longer than it was when it first went in the oven. So we've got to go from here into the mold. A little bit of spray is good, helps it slide up the sides a little bit. So we're just going to pick this guy up. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Ta-da! So you can see we're about this high. We're going to proof it to about here. Then we're going to egg wash and put sugar on it. We're going to score it. Then we're going to bake it and it's going to come up to here. And hopefully by the time we hang it upside down and set it, it'll even add another quarter inch or something. This is what we're going for in the end. Quite a contrast though, huh? Cover it, put a bin over it. Check this out. This is what we're going for. Fresh dough. It's like 2 1⁄2 inches probably at the top. Now we're proofed and we're about 5 1⁄2 at height. It's all air. Air, air, air, air. More air, more air, more air. So I'm going to put this guy aside. This is going to hang out for an hour or so. Da-da-da-da-da. So our egg wash here is just like one egg, one egg yolk, a little water. I'm going to be pretty generous with this egg wash here too. A little more moisture like that helps it expand even more. So it helps you avoid case hardening. Case hardening is when the bread goes in, gets too hard and crusty. It can't souffle up, so you lose your oven spray. We've been hunting down all those videos of your Panettone Roy. Obviously you're at scale. You're not going to score like a million a day when you're in production. This technique's dialed in. No scoring, but he's got a super high hydrated dough, high gluten. It's slacky. But what I found if I'm at home and I'm doing this, just with the dough that's consistent, easy to work with, and again, one day, right? One day. I'm just going to get a little bit of moisture on the egg wash, score it. You see it starts to open up already. That's pressure in the bread that's coming out already. Belgian pearl sugar. It's one of my favorites. And they actually make like different flavors of these. Like you could do like little pink ones, raspberry or whatever. See it looks like a lot, but as this dome kind of like doubles and triples in surface area, those little sugar bits are going to pull apart and look like a lot less. I'm doing a little bit more than these ones. These are pretty modest. We're ready for the oven. That's it. So this just came out of the oven. It's ripping hot. So we're going to get it upside down. If I just let it sit here, you can already start to see it. It's going to start sinking, especially over the next 30 minutes. Lots of ways to do this. You can have your little skewers. I'm going to put some fish hooks in here. Huah! Gentle. Okay. I'm going to be gentle here. Huah! So right now it's not touching the table. Not at all. But you can see it's actually getting closer and closer. Closer. And closer. I wouldn't want to hang it right off the bat, way high up in the air, because there is a potential that this starts to tear, like it kind of already is on this side, which is okay for now. But if it's too tender, it'll just tear off and fall and hit the ground. So I'm just putting it right on the table, so we can get a little support. But you can see now it's touching the table. So already, since we've hung it upside down, it's stretched out a half an inch. Right? So that's a good thing. So this is set. Obviously you're going to want to dig in right off the bat, but they're just going to collapse. Like the whole point is getting that air, capturing that air. And if you don't give it time to set up and chill and let those starches gel, you're going to cut into it and it's actually going to get denser. We're going to see if it's any good inside. Here we go! That's that cutting through the mold. It's handy to have that mold there. Oh my God. That's not bad. Check that out. Not bad, not bad, not bad, not bad. I know you said, I said you could sub zest. But man, you get a good red mandarin essential oil. Oh my God, that smells so good. This is actually a pretty darn good version. Like I'd be very happy with these. This is a very, very nice look. One of the reasons I like it, it's got some of these nice loose bubbles, but look how they're not just like all in one place too. They're still pretty dispersed. So it's definitely got some structure to it. Nice and fluffy. You want to compare to the gold standard? Roy does a good one. But again, Roy's a pro. He's the best in the world. This guy you can see, which is not my favorite. So if you really want to compare, let's compare the real one. That one. Oh, that's much better. Much better comparison. I would say this is by far better than any non-Roy Panettone I've ever bought in a store. For sure. So, but you can see how big his bubble structures, crumb structure, like lots of light gluten, lots of high hydration. This one again is a little more brioche. Again, we're looking at like his chocolate one. Do we have another one? Where's his other ones at? If this is a fruit one, then we don't need another one, but let's find out. Oh, that's a good one though. Dude, even a better comparison. Now we got a fair fight. Just a reminder, like I'm trying to get you as close as you can to one of Roy's Panettone in like a day. Pretty darn close. Pretty, pretty darn close. I think the only things I'm going to keep chasing, you can see how we've got kind of this like mushrooming thing coming here. So, if it's blowing out the side, that's pressure and expansion that should have been going up. So, I'm going to work on that. I think there's a few things to course correct for that, like the dough size, humidity in the oven, how and where you're scoring, if at all. I think the crust on the top, so he does a piping to keep it moist. I might move over to a piping. Man, at the end of the day, I really can't complain. This is like pretty spot on. I'm pretty proud of this recipe actually. Good job, Matthew. Man, that's it. That's upside down bread, a.k.a. Panettone. It's one nice way to still show you love this holiday season. Bake some.