Sourdough panettone

Even though I've had my sourdough starter Barney for more than 5 years, I never thought that I would actually make sourdough panettone, the 11/10 difficulty project that's been on the "To-do" list forever. Or rather.. the "To-dream" section.. 

Until this year, when I mentioned offhand to S a week before Christmas that I've been thinking about making sourdough panettones for a while.. 

The next day I got a message from his mother in Italy, "So I heard you are planning to make panettone. What ingredients should I prepare?" 

It was a classic face palm moment, how I adore S and his big mouth. What on earth was I getting myself into? I knew that I couldn't spend half of the Christmas holiday taking over his mother's kitchen baking panettones, which meant I have to do it in Toronto... 

Hurdle 1: It would be easy to find panettone paper moulds in a big city like Toronto, right? Wrong. Couldn't find it anywhere. 

No worries, I have Amazon Prime next day delivery, right? Wrong. Every option was going to get delivered on Dec 17, just 4 days before I left Toronto, leaving me no time to do a practice run... 

In a comical twist I bought the wrong sized papers from Amazon. I thought "large" meant that I could make one large one and that was it. Instead 10 mini papers showed up... right, I'll change to recipe to mini panettones, more cute anyway, right?  

Hurdle 2: I didn't realise until 4 days before the planned bake day that I was supposed to make a separate stiff starter, a pasta madre, and feed it for 1-2 weeks. From reading the Internet, the stiff starter increase the strength and capacity of the sourdough, just so that it can consume large amounts of "stuff" and still rise. Right, I'll just have to train up Barney, he's a good boy, right? I can do it in 4 days, right?? (Insert several horror face emojis here) 

Hurdle 3: All the recipes I saw involve mixing in a Kitchenaid for a long time, the dough looked soupy and soft. How was I supposed to mix it by hand? Luckily my friend has a Kitchenaid and I begged her to look through her cupboards for the dough hook she's never used. 

All right, after all that, let's get started on the pictorial journey of the panettones. 

First thing I did was make candied orange and lemon peel. I actually really enjoyed making this (and of course, eating them straight out of the jar). It's simply peeling the skin, blanching it 3 times to remove bitterness then simmering in syrup for an hour till reduced, then drying on a piece of baking paper till they are crystallised and delicious. 

After feeding my stiff sourdough for 4 days it was time to measure. There are two doughs done on sequential days, so each day started with measuring out all the ingredients and placing them in containers so I could easily transport them to my friend's place. 

This was the first dough at the end of the mixing on day one (about 45 minutes of mixing). It doesn't look like much, in fact I was wondering why the dough ball was so small. It said to leave it overnight 18 - 24hrs till tripled, so I wasn't worried about it too much.  

My friend was not staying at her place so nobody was watching the dough rise. After 18 hours we got back to her place, and the dough was HUGE! It had at least quadrupled in volume.. Punching it down was also super satisfying. 

The ingredients ready for the second dough, looks remarkably like the first dough prep but today there were also the fruit. 

Adding in the raisins soaked in rum overnight and orange/lemon peel at the end of mixing the second dough (about an hour of mixing) 

When to know when the kneading was enough? It didn't feel super elastic to me, but I had zero experience in making this kind of dough. I knew that both under- and over- kneading would be disastrous. I had to trust my instinct and I knew that once I added the fruit and went home, there would be no more mixing... 

I went home, divided and shaped the dough, inserted the skewers into the mould and placed the impossibly sticky dough balls inside them. They did not look like any Youtube videos I had watched, the dough was very hard to handle and I had to move very swiftly (in retrospect I realised because the butter was warming too much). I was glad just to get them in there in some kind of round ball shape... 

The recipe says to rise for 10 - 12 hours, so I thought shaping at 9pm would be well timed for a morning bake. At 4:30am (just 6.5hrs) I woke up from a nightmare that the dough had over-risen. I ran into the kitchen and they had already crowned! I shoved them into the fridge and resumed sleeping. 

Just before baking with a little dab of butter in the middle 

As soon as they came out, I had the fun activity of trying to flip hot dough balls upside down so that they could hang by their skewer bottoms - this is because panettone is so heavy with "stuff" that otherwise it will collapse on itself during cooling. 30 seconds before it starts to collapse! the internet said. I certainly didn't manage to get all of them flipped by 30 seconds, but I did a lot of laughing and yelping as the skewers had minds of their own when I tried to flip them.  

Here they are after a day of cooling, aren't they just gorgeous? 

A different view of them with the skewers removed. 

So pretty! I couldn't stop swooning over how beautiful they were. 

Here they are, three of them packaged up ready to go to Italy. Unfortunately being so tied up in the recipe, I had paid no attention to how I would actually transport them. I ended up cutting up Amazon Prime bubble wrap bags and using them as cushioning. 

One would have thought that I would have taken a billion crumb shots, but alas I did not. this was the only one that I managed in between three panettones we ate during Christmas 

The fourth one went with my friend who supplied the Kitchenaid to her family Christmas. She took a much better picture of the crumb!  

Here we are slicing the last panettone.. does anyone know why the part next to the paper is extra delicious? 

I'm so glad I did this project, it was hands down the most crazy project I have ever done, but it was super rewarding. This is what I wrote in my journal when it was all finished. 

This is the story of love. 

To bake and to share, to prepare something for someone, is the language of love. 

To believe that such a complicated recipe would work, is the power of love.