Italian Easter Bread Recipe (Pane di Pasqua)

Hi Bold Bakers! In honor of Easter around the corner today I'm going to show you how to make the beautiful Pane di Pasqua, an Italian Easter bread. It is so lovely and really delicious. We're going to start out first by dyeing our eggs for this beautiful bread. So here I have six bowls and I have six eggs and I am going to add a little bit of water to each bowl. To each bowl I'm going to add in a little bit of vinegar, this helps with the color. Just a teaspoon per each. Any type of vinegar, I use distilled, just regular vinegar. Now to each of the bowls we are going to add in our color. Lovely, these colors look nice and vibrant. So here I have some eggs, they have not been cooked and they're white, we need a white shelled egg. And we're going to add an egg into each bowl of color. Give it a little stir around while it's in there. Now we want to make these colors nice and vibrant so the eggs really take on that color. So if you need to add in a little bit extra food dye for them to be a darker color, then that's totally fine. Every so often just give them a little stir, make sure they're getting colored all the way around. So let them sit here for around 15 to 20 minutes and then just cover them with the water every so often to make sure they're getting the color all the way around evenly. Basically we just want to leave them in there until you reach the color that you're looking for. So if they need a little bit longer that's totally fine. Okay these look great, I'm going to remove them from the water. I'm just going to let these dry here until I know that the shell has kind of set and they're not going to smudge. You can also put them in the fridge and just so you know this can be done up to two days in advance. So let's get stuck into the actual bread dough. So the first part of this dough is to actually make a sponge. Here I have some flour, water and yeast and all you do are just mix these ingredients together. Instant yeast just goes straight into the flour. If you use active yeast I'll put a note on my website about that. And then we're going to add in our water and just mix this together. Now sponge is something that is required in some recipes but not all and the reason that we do it is to develop extra flavor and then also to give you a lighter texture and a sponge is generally fermented overnight and that's what we're going to do here. So the day before you want to make your bread I want you to make this sponge. You can also do the eggs the day before and save yourself some time. So just mix it up like that, it is not hard, you do not need to do it on a machine. Just hydrate all of that flour, cover it with a shower cap or a cling wrap. So now you don't really have to do anything, let it sit on your countertop for a minimum of 12 hours up to 18 hours and let that flavor develop and it'll get lovely and boozy. Let me show you what that will look like. So here I have a sponge that I made earlier and I wanted to show you what it's supposed to look like after the you know 12 to 18 hours. See the way it's lovely and bubbly like this? That means the yeast is doing its work, it smells kind of boozy which is absolutely perfect, it is not bad, that's what we want and you can tell that it is active and ready to go. Oh my gosh, I love that there's so much flavor in that sponge. So here's what I'm going to do, I'm going to add this to my stand mixer. Lovely, every last bit. In goes our flour, this is just all-purpose flour. We don't want extra gluten, this is a lovely soft dough and that's what all-purpose flour gives us. Next is our just granulated sugar, also known as caster sugar. Have a little bit of salt, always salt for flavor in our doughs. And a seed, super important ingredient in this bread, really gives it a unique flavor. Here I have some softened butter, just kind of cut up into cubes. In that goes. Last of it, in you go. And then here I have some instant yeast, I always use instant yeast, just keep that away from your salt on the other side of the bowl. That goes straight in with your dry ingredients. Next I'm going to add in my eggs, I have whole eggs and an egg yolk in there. And then some orange zest. Aniseed and orange are what really are unique to this dough and make it really special. It's fresh, it's springtime, it's absolutely beautiful. When we first made this during our bulk shoot for Bigger Bolder Baking, once I bit into this bread I was like, this is special, this is something so lovely and perfect for Easter and for springtime. The Italians really knew what they were doing when they made this. So there's our orange zest. Now lastly we are going to add in Fiore di Sicilia? Is that right? Fiore di Sicilia. Fiore di Sicilia. So this flavor is a combination of orange and vanilla. So if you want to use orange extract or orange flavor and then add some vanilla you can totally do that. I love this brand Rodel and I'm going to use a and it really just gives this dough a lovely bright flavor. Lovely. Now we're going to turn on the machine and let this dough just come together. That butter will mix in, the eggs will combine, the sponge will work its way all the way throughout. Have a look there, so there's our dough. It is soft but it's not wet. It's lovely. Get a dough scraper in there, get that into a nice big bowl. Lovely. Look at all that lovely fresh orange zest in there. Get every last bit out. Beautiful. Our next step, cover it up, cling wrap or a shower cap. Nice and snug. I'm going to put George's kitty cat tea towel over it, which definitely will help it rise. And we're going to leave this at room temperature to proof for around two hours. When a dough is a little bit shaggier and wetter it does need a little bit longer to proof. So we're just going to let this hang out and we're going to come back to it and I'll show you what it should look like. So it's been two hours. Let me show you this dough. Like I said, it's not going to rise a ton because it's kind of a heavier dough, a wetter dough, but this feels and looks good to me. So look at those lovely bubbles that have formed. Look at that. During the proofing, this is exactly what I want from this kind of dough. When I learned how to make brioche all those years ago in college, this is what we were looking for. So when you pull it apart, you still see all of this lovely, almost like a spider web. Do you know what I mean? It's just, oh, that's how, you know, I hate when you get a brioche or a challah and it's just like, um, sliced bread. Like this is what we're going for. Yeah, baby. Okay. Onto your countertop, Sinead. I'm going to bring in a little bit of flour because this is a little bit sticky. You always know when a bread is just going to be fantastic because you can feel it. Even at this stage, you can feel like this is a good dough. Okey dokey. Let's talk and Gemma. Divide that into two please. We are going to roll each of these out to around 20 inches. Just kind of shape it into a log and roll all the way out. You know, not too much flour on your counter now for this because it can be very hard to roll when you have too much flour on your counter. As you roll one and it kind of can become a little bit harder to keep on rolling, start to roll the other. Just like any yeasted dough, it might need a minute to relax before we can roll it again. Just let that gluten relax. As we create recipes for Bigger Bolder Baking and we look at the seasons, for years and years I have seen this bread pop up and I never did it. You know, I never kind of looked into it. And then just recently I was like, this is really beautiful and so unique. You know, we have a lot of springtime Easter recipes on Bigger Bolder Baking. You know, it's such a big holiday in Ireland, so I like to make sure it's represented. Lovely. That's 20. Now here's what we're going to do. This is not complicated. You do not have to be an expert baker like myself. All we're going to do is just braid these. And all I mean is just laying one over the other. It's not really a braid. So just kind of mush them together at the top just to form a bit of a seal. Then braid over, one over the other. So we end up with a twist just like this. And then I'm going to bring in my tray lined with parchment. And let's shape it on here. Want to make sure that you do get those 20 inches because we want to make sure that it's a nice big loaf. And then just kind of pierce those ends together. Do give it a bit of a pull on your tray to make sure that it's, you know, a decent sized circle for our wreath. So now here's what we're going to do. We're going to cover it up again, just lightly. And by lightly, I mean lay over the cling wrap, giving us space and the ability to move when it grows. And we are going to let this proof for around an hour to an hour and a half. It does take a little bit longer than other doughs, like I said. And again with our kitty cat towel, George will be delighted. I'm going to set it over to the side and let it do its thing. Before it goes into the oven, we're going to come back, place in those lovely eggs, egg wash, and then straight in to get it baked. So while our bread is doing our second proof, let's just make our glaze now so we have everything ready. Glaze is really simple. It's just some powdered sugar. We're going to add in a splash of milk and then just whisk it together until it's smooth and you get the consistency that we want. You want it to be kind of thick to pour all over our bread. This looks perfect. It's just going to give you a lovely extra sweet bite at the end when you're eating your bread. Lovely, cover it up right now and just forget about it until later. So our bread has proofed. Look at this. It actually rose up nicely. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to make a little space to pop in our eggs and just space them evenly out in between the twists. And then lastly, we're going to egg wash. So this bread traditionally is actually symbolic. The eggs refer to life and the wreath is to symbolize Easter, the rising of Christ, and then also just to remember the crown of thorns that he wore. So it's a very symbolic and beautiful bread. Okay, lovely. No more messing around. Let's get this beautiful loaf into the oven. So bake your bread at 375 degrees Fahrenheit, 190 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes. You're going to want to set a timer because once that time is done, then you're going to turn down your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, 180 degrees Celsius for a further 20 minutes. If your loaf starts to get too brown, then just cover it with a little bit of foil. Our Easter bread is a lovely golden brown, so I'm going to take it out of the oven now. It really looks so impressive. However, I'm not going to stop here. Let's generously drizzle over that icing that we made. I like to do this while it's still warm so it kind of sets on the warm bread. And then of course, traditionally, you would add on sprinkles. And what's not to love about adding sprinkles to this? It adds extra texture and it just ups the level of fun that this recipe already is. Once you cut into this bread, you'll see how lovely and soft it really is just by touching it. This enriched dough is probably one of the nicest I've made in many years. Not only is it nice and soft, but the flavor is great too. This bread is delicate and it almost melts in your mouth, like a cross between a doughnut and a brioche. And then the added flavor of the orange extract, the vanilla, and then the aniseed in there just like really elevates this bread. This recipe is definitely going to be on my table this Easter Sunday. I hope you enjoyed this recipe, but don't go anywhere because I have tons more spring and Easter content for you to check out so get comfortable. I'll see you back here this time, same place, next week with another new video.