Panettone Super Spongy and Delicious

The Panettone, is a very typical bread of the Christmas season, it is a bread made with a brioche type mass and flavored with chocolate chips, candied fruits or polished fruits, it is a bread of Italian origin with a dome of height of about 15 centimeters approximately, there are many legends about the origin of panettone. According to the first of these, the history of this dessert was born more than five centuries ago, around 1490, when a young aristocrat, Ughetto Atellani de Futi, fell in love with the daughter of a pastry chef in Milan. To show his love, he passed himself off as a confectioner's apprentice and invented a sweetened, dome-shaped bread based on candied fruit and lemon and orange aroma. The Milanese began to go en masse to the bakery to ask for the "bread of Toni", who was called the assistant, and that's where the name panettone comes from. In several countries of the world it was popularizing its recipe and personalizing it, in some countries eat the panettone with a hot chocolate at breakfast or with coffee, some toast them and others fill them with jam or creams, and still of all the Ways you eat it, this is a wonderful bread and very rich to eat at any time of the day, make an original panettone would take about 7 days, but today I give you the recipe for you to do it faster then I write a Easy recipe for a large traditional 1 kilo panettone, when you finish making it you will look like a true Italian baker!

Ingredients:
► PREFERMENT
● 100ml Milk
● 5g Fresh yeast (can be replaced by 2g of dry yeast)
● 1 Cdta Orange blossom water
● 150g Force flour (EYE can not be made with loose pastry flour)

► FINAL MASS
● 2 Tbsp Rum (brandy or cognac)
● 100g Raisins
● 40ml Milk
● 10g Fresh yeast (can be replaced by 4g of dry yeast)
● 2 Eggs L
● 1 Cdta Vanilla Extract
● 1 Cdta Agua de Azahar (orange blossom water)
● Orange scratch
● 300g Force flour
● 120g Sugar
● Pinch of salt
● 120g Butter
● 50g Chocolate chips

Procedure: ► We start with the pre-mix mixing the yeast, the warm milk and the orange-blossom water very well until the yeast is completely diluted, then we strain the flour and add it and mix and knead it very well until we have a smooth, compact mixture. and uniform and then place it at the bottom of a greased bowl and cover it with plastic wrap and let it stand at room temperature (between 21 and 25 degrees Celsius) for about 3 hours (this process is very important, as the preferment helps that the panettone has a better leavening and also has a good body with a good crumb)

► Then with the ingredients of the final dough, add the rum to the raisins and mix them very well (this is to moisturize the raisins and then incorporate them into the panettone) and cover them with a paper film so that the alcohol does not evaporate and let them mash a minimum of 2 hours. Then warm the milk and dilute the yeast in the milk and add it in a large bowl to mix, add to the same bowl the two eggs (half shakes for better incorporation), orange blossom water, vanilla essence, orange zest , the sieved strength flour, the sugar and the salt, if you have a kitchen assistant or a mixer, start mixing all the mentioned ingredients there or else start mixing with a palette and then with your hands until you form a smooth and homogeneous mass , after about ten minutes of kneading, add little by little (either amano or in your mixer) the butter cut into cubes and knead for 10 to 15 more minutes until the butter is completely incorporated and until a soft dough is obtained. that does not stick to the hands (if you see that when you add the butter you see that the dough becomes very soft and sticky, do not worry, just knead consecutively and you will see that the consistency of your dough will change) after incorporating butter very well and you do not know if your dough is completely kneaded, do the test of the membrane, is to take a small piece of dough and stretch it with your own hands until it is very thin and you can see a little through the dough, that means that your dough is completely kneaded and if that does not happen keep kneading for another 5 minutes until you get this consistency.

► Then place your dough on a clean counter (lightly, but very lightly, greased with a little margarine so that it does not stick) and stretch it very well to form a square and place the filling (the chocolate sparks and raisins with the Rum and distribute them very well for all the stretched dough and I roll your dough into a ball and knead a little to finish mixing the filling very well throughout the dough, after that, grease a bowl and roll the dough and place it in the bottom of the bowl and let it rest in a place that is not too cold (between 21 and 25 degrees Celsius) and covered with a paper film for 3 hours

► When you see that the dough has increased more than twice its size, we grease the hands with a little oil so that the dough does not stick to our hands, and work the dough kneading it a bit to degas it and get it to be the same size as it was 3 hours ago, after that the dough is blown (putting all its ends together down and towards the center) and place it in a panettone mold of one kilo (or you can divide the dough into two and make panettone a little smaller) and agree that it is in contact with the whole dough and the bottom of the mold and the corners of the inside walls of the mold and cover it with a plastic paper and let it stand at a temperature between 21 and 25 degrees Celsius until the level of the mass begins to be at the same level of the mold (but not over the dough), this takes about 4 hours to increase its size approximately

► One time I take the bread, we brush the whole surface with a varnish of an egg and a spoonful of liquid milk, with a knife (extremely sharp) or a new razor blade, we make a cross cut in the surface of the bread and we put a few pieces of butter in the cuts that we have just made and take it to a preheated oven at about 180 degrees Celsius with heat up and down for about 45 minutes (place it in the lower half of the oven because this bread grows a lot) and know if your bread is ready, punctured with a stick height and if it comes out clean is because it is completely cooked, another way of knowing is if it is golden brown, overturned and touch it in the background and if it sounds egg as a drum means that it is cooked.
► Once the bread is baked, coming out of the oven, immediately prick it with a panettone chilled fork or with two skewer sticks and place it upside down holding the skewers (c as if it were a bat) until it got cold, this technique is called, the bat technique, is so that the panetone is cooled evenly and so that it remains with a large alveolate in the crumb and is very spongy (you can leave it resting in this case as I did with a chair and the edge of a table).

► Once it's cold, you can taste it, grind it and enjoy it at any time of the day with either a good coffee or a good chocolate. This bread is undoubtedly the best gift for that special person on these Christmas

Note: This bread, you can combine the filling, you can use two types of raisins or one (I use blond raisins and black raisins), too you can use more chocolate chips or less, or change the filling completely and fill it with candied fruits or the polished fruits that you like the most. It is very important that you use force flour (000) because this bread needs a lot of body so that it grows to that size and it looks more presentable in its crumb and in the alveolate, the flour that I use has a content of 12.5% ​​in protein, make sure to have the best ingredients to have the best result, also as a decoration you can add pearl sugar to the top before baking. It is a pleasure to be here sharing recipes for all of you, any doubts you have, do not forget to comment below that I will undoubtedly be answering as soon as possible.

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