By peak, I mean the point at which the starter has risen to its greatest height.
The pH seems to be ok. The correct values are between 3.80, after refrigeration at 4C/39F or after overnight rest, and 4.30-4.80 when itās ripe (some bakers consider 4.3 and others (e.g. Giorilli) 4.5 as the best). You already know that the pH can be correct while the starter is completely out of balance. Learn to recognize its condition by smell, color, texture and alveolatura (the holes in the dough). And donāt forget to taste.
If you want to raise the pH with a bath (not always necessary), slice the lievito and put it in water at 20-22C/68-72F with ~2g of sugar (if you have some fructose use it) per liter of water. Remove after 15-20 minutes, squeeze and refresh with 1:2:1 ratio. Repeat the refresh until acidity is correct. This is a bath with general recommendations that may vary depending on how you maintain your starter and the level of correction needed.
Always refresh the starter with a strong flour. Giorilli recommends one with a w 350 and P/L 0.55. Montanari used to prefer a much stronger flour, but has recently lowered its strength. Some mills sell flour specially made for starters in 10 kg sacks. I make mine by adding 8% gluten to a medium strength flour. I have calculated that this should result in a W ~340-360.
No, it doesnāt, butā¦ yes, it does.
Panettone flours are excellent, but they are also one-size-fits-all products.
Pasini: W 390/420 P/L 0.55/0.60 (origin of wheat: USA and Canada)
Giambattista Montanari is a consultant for Pasini, but only his pandoro recipe uses a flour with similar values. If you follow any of his many panettone recipes, youāll have to make some adjustments. You take some risks if you modify the flour, and you take some risks if you donāt.
Dallagiovanna has two kinds of panettone flour:
Tipo 00 Panettone: W 390 P/L 0.55
Tipo 00 Panettone Zeta: W 360 P/L 0.50
In the US they only sell a W 390 flour.
Massari and Achille Zoia work with Dallagiovanna. In this case itās better because some of their recipes call for flours close to or the same as the Zeta flour, but itās not available in North America.
You donāt have the instruments to measure the values of your flour like the mills have, especially P (resistance to extension) and L (extensibility), but with some experience, calculations and trial and error, you can make flours for your panettone using gluten, wheat starch and blends of good flours. Including those available here at breadtopia to create more interesting flavors.
And itās a good idea to test first with some less demanding lievitati.
Happy bakings!
And congrats on your panettoni.
Wow, thank you Leonardo, that is fascinating information! Are you saying that itās common practice to modify panettone flours to increase/decrease the gluten beyond that occurring naturally in the wheat? My only experiences with gluten additions resulted in stringy, uneven textureā¦ maybe I need to learn how to do this?
I also have not made pandoro, Iāve only been baking panettoneā¦ which I really prefer. I do own Omnia Fermenta, but since I donāt speak Italian, itās slow going for me. From reading so many panettone recipes over the last few years, I understand some of it, and the rest I look up. But Iām interested in Montenariās expertise in managing lievito madre; I havenāt baked his panettone, maybe I should.
Cresci was the first panettone book I ever bought, but I didnāt know that they were using a particular flour. I do often use a āweakerā flour for the second impasto, but I donāt know the W value, as that isnāt provided by the maker here.
thank you, Sue
Thatās what mills do all over the world, not just in Italy with panettone flour. Crops are always different. They blend different flours and gluten to produce a consistent quality flour over the years. Flours for professional use have a narrower tolerance range than retail flours.
Years ago I started to improve the quality of my baking by modifying the flour with gluten or starches. Later a technician who had worked in a mill for years confirmed that this was common practice, and he recommended that people get strong flour or vital gluten and do the same to get any flour they need.
Obviously you used way too much gluten. I hope you didnāt do that with a panettone.
I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with my pizza. I needed to increase the hydration and fermentation time. The weak flour and the constant high room temperature didnāt allow that. I only had AP flour. I could have bought bread flour. I knew it was often an AP flour with gluten and diastatic malt added. I could do that myself and choose the exact strength I needed.
My flour label read: servig size 34g, protein 4g. That is 11.75% protein.
I found more info about gluten content in Italian than in English, but the characteristics are always in W values. Using tables in books and online that gave a rough equivalent W-protein%, I came up with an estimate. Looking at my notes, I see that I started with a 5% addition and after a few tests raised it to 6.5%. Next was a focaccia genovese. Flatbreads are ideal for baking tests. In this case I lowered the gluten a bit. Towards the end of the fermentation, a few balls like chewing gum bubbles came out of the dough. I knew this was a sign of too much gluten. I ended up with 3.5%.
With these two references, I can easily adjust the gluten addition for breads and enriched breads without any problem.
I understand that pandoro is more distant from the American taste than panettone. Also in Italy there are personal preferences. Iām lucky to like both. Did you know that in many parts of Italy, panettone was initially and for a long time considered a commercial/cultural invasion? Each area of the country has its own centuries-old traditional holiday desserts.
Anyway, making pandoro can be even more challenging than making panettone, with its butter and egg yolk content pushed to the extreme.
If it works, itās perfect, and it makes sense since itās only fermenting for the final rise. You can also experiment with āspecialā flours.
Omnia Fermenta is a great complement and partly an update of Montanariās first book pH 4.1.
Feel free to ask anything you canāt translate. Itās a good thing that Zoia and Massariās Cresci comes in a bilingual edition.
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Thank you so much for this response, I now want to try the gluten mixingā¦ probably not for panettone though because of the risk factor! My bad experience was back a couple of years ago, before I was able to buy Italian panettone flour. I had a bag of Antimo Caputo 00 Rinforzato flour, which I thought was probably gluten-modified by Caputo. This flour may have been a little too old by the time I used it, but the 1st impasto became lumpy and stringy almost immediately. Yes, like chewing gum balls!
That is interesting about pandoro. I do own a pandoro pan, so I should really try it, will do! I baked panettone yesterday, so this would be a good thing to try, for variety.
This panettone batch is āpureā,., without any white chocolate or cocoa butter. But the crumb is very light, moist and feathery, quite satisfying. Scaled 975 g in a 1 Kg mould, so I was able to do a full 4.5 hours on the final rise.
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Bravissima, bello e buono!
When I start baking ārealā stuff again, Iāll need some advice from you.
While cocoa butter is optional in panettone, donāt skip it in pandoro. Pandoro canāt be inverted to set. Cocoa butter helps keep it from collapsing.
In the book Cresci there is a recipe for nadalin. Nadalin is the old traditional holiday sweet bread from Verona. It was the inspiration for the creation of modern pandoro, that was originally an industrial product. Like many other traditional breads it is being rediscovered and improved by local and master bakers. I think that knowing the history behind what we bake makes it more interesting.
I usually use basic brioche as a tester for enriched doughs.
On flour and gluten again
Freshly milled flour is not ideal for the demanding grandi lievitati, as aging improves the strength of the gluten.
Every year, and only for the holiday season, Pasini sells a special panettone flour that has been aged for an additional four weeks. Blanching, which has a similar effect, is not allowed in the European Union for health reasons.
You can use flour close to its expiration date. Or you can speed up the aging process by mimicking what mills do in their silos. If you go this route, place the flour in the bowl of the planetary mixer with the whisk attachment. Run it at low speed from time to time over period of several weeks. Protect the flour by covering the bowl with a towel. Avoid kitchen odors and high humidity and temperatures.
Ah, I checked and the current 25 Kg bag of Pasini panettone flour that I am using was delivered in late Mayā¦ and I bought two more 10 Kg bags in Novemberā¦ so they are all old enough at this point! It might be a while before I start using the new bags.
I guess aging reduces the amylase?
Iām looking at the Nadalin recipe nowā¦ seems quite similar to the panettone process. And it implies that there are nadalin moulds, to help get that star shape, need to check, thanks!
I donāt know the chemical effect of oxidation on flour, but I donāt think it acts on the amylase because, to the best of my knowledge, the result would be negative in that case.
On a practical level I know that the flour becomes more stable, absorbs the fats better and reduces the risk of deflation.
The 8-pointed star mold was created for pandoro by an artist commissioned by Melegatti, who wanted an original shape for his new product.
Traditional nadalin was baked as a simple loaf of bread. Contemporary nadalin is baked in a pandoro pan or shaped by hand into a star. Massari gives this other option at the end of the same recipe.
All the traditional holiday breads were baked without a pan and were wide and low. Motta, the creator of modern panettone, made it narrower and taller as we know it. Galup, in Turin, followed the Milanese panettone with a similar paper mold, but left it lower and wider. In Genoa, they still bake their Pan di Genova (aka panettone di Genova) the old way. Galup was the first to cover the bread with a hazelnut glaze, a more recent addition to panettone.
Pandoro
Pasini also has a pandoro flour that has a strength of W 440-470, much more than the strongest panettone flour (W 390-420 ~16%, maybe ~17%, protein).
I told you, pandoro is a beast.
My pleasure!
In this post I gave a link to Massariās and Giorilliās articles. The third article by Massari has some tips on pandoro. Every little bit can help.
It seems that you add candied citrus peel to your panettone. How do you get them? Itās almost impossible to find decent candied fruit.
If you do it yourself, I hope you donāt follow the recipe in Chambellandās Sourdough Panettone and Viennoiserie. Itās not the worst Iāve seen, but itās still terrible by my standards.
If you are interested, I can tell you the right way to do it.
I have two good sources of candied peel: Nuts dot com and Superior Nut (also has a website). I use the long slices and chop them, because the chopped ones were not as good. I think the source is either Italy or Spain, but not sure. The peels are very nice, thick and sweet. I tried making my own originally, but they ended up being thin and disappointing.
I have also candied chestnuts for panettone, using the multi-day process, but havenāt done that this year.
Thank you for the link to the post, I will read it!!
This is really fascinating. I thought about buying the Cresci book for several years before I actually bought it. I am very interested in brioches of all sorts, possibly because of the parallels with cheesemaking, another thing Iāve studied. Now I know why there are basso and tall forms of panettone, cool.
I looked at the pandoro flour on Pasiniās website, and unfortunately I canāt get that here. Maybe I could calculate how much gluten to add to their panettone flour though!
My cheesemaking is limited to curdled milk as a substitute for ricotta when I canāt get good ricotta.
My only attempt to make real cheese was a traditional fresh cheese I needed for baking. The result was excellent, much better than I expected, but too little for what I needed. I tried to make ricotta with the leftover whey, but it didnāt work. I canāt understand why. Maybe because of the salt. In that case it means that ricotta can only be made with unsalted whey. Another thing to investigate.
I wouldnāt worry about not being able to get this flour. Its use is very limited. Pasini only started selling it in 2018 (I found an old email from a newsletter in my inbox announcing it). You donāt have a recipe with this flour. All these flours with very high gluten content are mixed with weaker flours to create a flour with the exact characteristics you need, with more precision than adding gluten, that is always a guess.
Vital gluten flours have an average 75-80% gluten content (check the label). If you add 1% of it, you increase the protein by 0.75-0.8% and, more importantly, the W value by about 50 points.
In your case:
Pasini Panettone flour:
W 390-420
P/L 0,50-0,55
Pasini Pandoro flour:
W 440-470
P/L 0,55-0,65
If you add 1% gluten to the panettone flour, you get the exact W value of the pandoro flour. I have no idea about the variation of the P/L index.
The P/L index indicates the resistance you encounter when kneading the dough. For enriched doughs, itās never lower than 0.50. The P/L index of 0.65 in the pandoro flour means that it can withstand longer fermentation than panettone flour that has a value of 0.55. Thatās good because pandoro is always made with at least 3 doughs (3 impasti).
Donāt think that all flours sold in Italy have a label with the W-P/L values. Only those intended for professional use and very few (the best) of those sold in retail stores.
Iām going to try the pandoro flour creation! This sounds like fun. Thank you!
Probably not the salt. If your process involved heating the milk to a very high temperature, the albumin protein will have already precipitated out (like with yogurt). Or, if your whey became overly acidified during or after the cheesemaking process, it becomes much less likely to produce ricotta.
Thank you!
Probably both. I added 5% rennet and heated to 80C/175F. Then I added the usual amount of vinegar to the whey.
I also read again the detailed information I have and itās a hybrid between a cheese and ricotta. Iām thinking of making it again, not for baking, but as a filling or sauce for pasta.
btw, itās a seirass.