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Toast bread pretending to be sourdough

Warm milk, bread flour, a little cornflour, a little wholemeal, salt and yeast together yield a soft and tender loaf that toasts beautifully, makes great rolls and has a lovely colour. It’s not sourdough and I’m wondering if you add cornflour to a sourdough loaf whether you will get the same soft crumb… I’ve added the ingredients list at the bottom of the page.

Not had one of these in the garden before!

This little being is a white wagtail – we usually get pied wagtails in our towns, but not these. We get a grey wagtail sometimes, they of course are yellow bellied. This morning saw one of the jays from the woods come into the garden as well as the usual gang of finches, tits and starlings. The wood pigeons are getting fat, they will become sparrowhawk food if they carry on eating all the food we put out.

Better late than never!

Christmas cake, christmas cake, mix and put in tin. This is Mr Lepard’s caramel cake and I baked it today. I really enjoyed the bit where the cream hits the caramel and turns to liquid fudge. I quite wanted to stop there and just eat the whole lot with a spoon, but I didn’t…

Glad I used a deep tin and made a cuff for this one

This is an 18 cm diameter tin and the recipe came to the top exactly! The cake survived baking and I will think of something to put on the top tomorrow. I’ll tell you what it’s like when we cut it.

PS: Someone asked me how to make this bread. It’s pretty basic but here we go….

Zeb’s golden toast bread:

520 grams of full fat milk warmed to at least room temperature (aiming for a dough temperature of about 76 F)
700 g strong white (bread) flour
50 g of cornflour
50 g plain wholemeal flour (not the strong sort, but the sort you use for pastry)
16 g sea salt
15 g fresh yeast or 1 sachet of active instant yeast
1 tbsp barleymalt (optional – gives a nice colour to the crumb and some easy food for the yeast)

Mix dough in your preferred manner. I used a Kenwood this time. Milk in first, followed by yeast, barleymalt, salt and flours. You should have a medium firm dough that is easy to knead. Mix for about 3 minutes on lowest speed. Hand knead briefly and into lightly oiled bowl to prove for ninety minutes. Divide the dough into two, shape 650 g boules, final prove in 750 g size round bannetons, until doubled, dusted with flour. Bake at 220 C for 30 minutes, reduce temperature to 200 C for 10 minutes more. Cool on rack. This dough will also give you a nice baker’s dozen of 100 g rolls.

Links to Great Panettone Recipes – updated December 2014

Mini panettones Christmas 09

Another Update : December 2014

As Celia has referenced this post which I had long forgotten, I just wanted to add a pair of links. Firstly to Michael Wilson’s Italian Baking Blog Staff of Life and secondly to The Fresh Loaf where Michael Wilson also posts and discusses panettone and pandoro formulae he has worked on. Michael Wilson’s work is some of the best I have found on the internet for people wanting to know more about using natural yeast/sourdough/madre/lieveto naturo for making these fantastic and special breads.

As I recall the most important thing is to supercharge the starter so it reproduces and builds very quickly, stays mild and ‘yeasty’ as opposed to slow and ‘bacterial’. If you can get hold of SAF Gold dried yeast if you are doing a yeasted version, this yeast copes better with the load of sugar, eggs, butter etc than ordinary dried yeast. It is called ‘osmo-tolerant’. Anyway good luck all ye home bakers of panettone, May the rise be with you!

Pandoro Zeb Bakes And just to show you that I do still occasionally bake these enriched breads – above is a crumb shot of a pandoro I made back in 2013 using the recipe and method from Artisan Baking Across America by Maggie Glezer which she calls Bruno’s Pandoro. It is very similar to panettone and in some ways easier to make as it has no fruit in it.

November 2011: I thought I’d just update this quickly as people keep asking me about panettone and I haven’t made one of the all bells and whistles ones yet this year,

I have made this one that looks like panettone and has the flavours and fruits and if you have run out of time or eggs you could give this one a try like I did. It is not as tender and melt in the mouth as one of the ones made from the recipes below but it’s a nice cake and I see similar ones on lots of blogs here and there. There are no short cuts to the best panettone.

For those people who pitch up here on a serious modern style panettone hunt here are some suggestions:-

Floyd who runs the Fresh Loaf, that wonderful international forum for bread bakers wrote this post about making panettone without all the fancy bits. I am sure that if you visit over there and have a little search you will find many fine bakers making panettone to inspire you too. Edit : Here is a recent post by txfarmer with pictures to drool over! The recipe he used is here on itchefs – I am going to read it later but just adding it in quickly now. Lots and lots of egg yolks!

The one I made in 2009, all by hand was so good I made them several times in various shapes and sizes, followed the method and recipe from Susan at Wild Yeast’s recipe and method here – it worked for me and I really like the topping!

Edit December 2012. Susan at Wild Yeast has written an updated post with even more detail and tips and I am having another go this holiday.

She has other panettone posts on her site too, so spend some time there as she is a master baker.

Dan Lepard has a recipe here that I would love to make if I have the time. He has also written a new ‘easy panettone’ recipe which you can find on the Guardian’s site in the How to Bake column that he does each week there. The old forum where so many of us contributed has been put to bed so I have taken out the links to the big panettone post there as it is no longer available to view.

For those of you who hanker after the pearl sugar to sprinkle on the top; one UK source is Totally Swedish who have a webshop and a retail shop in London, they also have packets of a yeast type designed for sweet breads, which I think is the same thing as osmo-tolerant yeast. If anyone knows of other sources, I’d be happy to list them here. Bakery Bits has the cases in all sizes, pearl sugar as of this year (2011) and the fabled Fiori di Sicilia and Panettone essences in stock as well.

Joanna @ Zeb Bakes

PS Here is a pic of my sourdough at the ‘1st dough’ stage of Susan’s instructions one Christmas, nestled under the stairs on top of the water heater… I thought it might explode…

Making Panettone the long way with sourdough

Sourdough ahoy!

Other suggestions for panettone recipes : Lynn has found this one in Delicious magazine

Do have a look at Ulrike’s classic Milanese panettone. (see her comment below) She’s a very fine baker indeed!

Hamelman’s Horst Bandel Rye Bread in a Milk Loaf Tin

Horst Bandel black rye pumpernickel Jeffrey Hamelman

Photo by Brian

It’s that bread again! (the long slow baked rye grain bread with the great back story in Bread by Jeffrey Hamelman) which is one of the Mellow Bakers November breads.

I posted my last year’s version of this a little while ago but I have made it again – practice, munch, practice. It’s fun!

A little Swedish Kaviar

I had a long think about how you could manage this bread without a pullman. I think the answer, (and I will make it a third time to test it out by the end of the month I hope) is to use a regular loaf pan and once the dough is in the tin, grease and flour a sheet of foil, and place it over the top of the tin and either wrap the whole tin in foil tightly or tie it on with string round the rim of the tin. Alternatively if you don’t mind what shape your bread comes out, use any bake proof container that has a sealable lid, so a pudding basin or a cast iron pot or something like that.

Mise en place

The key thing is to keep the moisture in during the long gentle bake.

My other tips are

Raw and Cooked Rye Grain

Make sure the grains (use wheat if you can’t get hold of rye) are well soaked and really well cooked so they are plump and moist and soft. They act as storage for the water during the bake.
Old Bread Soaker

Slice the old bread thinly and bake it a bit more in the oven before you soak it. Only use as much water as you need to cover it; you are only going to have to squeeze the water out later after all.
The hardest bit is judging how wet to make the dough, too wet and the bread will never really dry out enough, too dry and it will be a bit chewier than you want. That’s not very helpful but everyone’s combination of grains and breads is going to vary. I think I would want to go for a dough that I can shape into a baton that I can pick up without it breaking apart the moment I lift it from the bench, so go for firmer rather than wetter.

Another experiment revealed!

I have a milk loaf tin which has a clip on lid so I thought I would try it out in that. In my mind the bread would rise, slowly into the top half and I would have incredibly sophisticated round slices of bread, perfect for canapes. The drawback, pretty major, of these tins is that you can’t open them to check on progress. There is a tiny peep hole in the top of the tin – once the dough is at the top you can see it. This dough didn’t get that far. I stuck a toothpick in the hole every so often to see if I could judge where it had got to, but it never got right to the top. In fact I overproved this one by about 6 hours (!) and you can see the results here. I don’t think it made any difference to the bread though, in fact it might have improved the flavour a bit.

What do you reckon to this one?

So I ended up with a half round loaf. This time it was completely cooked through and very even in texture. Still not as dark as I would like it to be to justify being called ‘black rye’. I like the taste, much milder than I thought it was going to be; sweet and nutty and very fragrant.

Zeb's windowpane test!