Keys to a perfect Panettone
With Christmas comes our favorite Christmas sweet… panettone! 🍞🎄 It could be said that each chef has his own recipe for panettone, but the goal is always the same, that it be tender, fluffy and full of flavor.
Undoubtedly, tasting a Panettone like this is a unique experience that awakens our senses, especially if it is made with the highest quality, nutritious and tasty ingredients.
In this article we share with you our secret tricks for obtaining an excellent result. Let's begin!
Sourdough
Surely you have heard of sourdough on some occasion, but perhaps you still do not know exactly what it is. Sourdough is a mixture of flour and water that naturally contains some bacteria, and yeast. It makes the panettone ferment, providing it with an unmistakable and very pleasant aroma, and also ensuring that it has a spongy texture for longer. In short, pure magic!
Every day we cut a portion of sourdough and add flour and water to feed it. This allows us to keep it alive and be able to use it whenever we want.
For our panettone, we make what we call "a first mix" with one part of sourdough, flour, water, butter, egg yolk, coconut sugar and Panela, and let it rest for approximately 16 hours until it triples in volume.
The selection of ingredients
Once the dough has fermented, we knead it again with the rest of the ingredients of the recipe.
As we already mentioned, we use coconut sugar and panela, which - from our point of view - provide a pleasant flavor and improve the nutritional profile of the panettone.
On the other hand, in addition to using high-quality Fench butter (and this is essential, since the flavor of butter predominates in the preparation), we incorporate Enrenou Extra Virgin olive oil. It adds flavor and improves the texture of the baked dough.
Along with the butter, we add real vanilla from Madagascar (never use vanilla flavor or extract). This really makes all the difference.
Finally, we add the ingredients that will determine the variety of the panettone: fruit or chocolate.
To make a candied fruit Panettone, use good quality oranges that provide a unique aroma. We use oranges from Castellón that we submerge in a syrup containing 50% less sugar than what we find in traditional candied fruits. This is BASIC.
For its part, in the chocolate panettone we use a bean-to-bar chocolate that we make ourselves with organic vegan cocoa paste, coconut sugar and corn fiber. As in the fruit Panettone, here the chocolate must be of good quality, since it will be present in each bite.
Continuing with the elaboration process, we round the dough and let it ferment again for another 6 to 8 hours so that the panettone develops all its characteristic aromas.
The baking
Finally, we cover the panettones with the crunchy dough, replacing the typical pearl sugar that covers most of the classic panettones.
We add nuts and proceed to bake it in the oven!
We use the ovens from our family pastry & bakery business, which are over 30 years old and have never failed us.
Once baked, we check that the panettones have the right temperature and place them upside down to let them cool until they are ready to be packed.
With this technique, we preserve their volume and fluffiness.
As you can see, we take care of all the details of the production process so that you have a unique tasting experience.
In this article we tried to capture the love and affection that we put into making our panettones, but so that you can see it with your own eyes, we also prepared a video in which Jordi explains this entire process in detail. We hope you like it!
