These little Panettone are a bit of fun, a two day process that is so totally worth it! Panettone is all about FRAGRANCE… orange peel, butter, honey… feel free to experiment with spice, lemon peel or fresh zest, vanilla, build up those flavours for a real light and fragrant bread.

The recipe starts with a preferment which is there to inject a little additional time into our recipe. It’s an opportunity to bring additional flavour to the party as well as LIGHTNESS too!

Traditionally panettone are LARGE, you’ve seen them in the box in the supermarket right? The dough is so light that they are hung upsidown after baking to make sure they don’t collapse under their own weight when they cool. Baked in small panettone papers like these over the traditional MASSIVE one means that we don’t need to worry about that happening, we can quite happily bake these at home and cool them on a wire rack as normal.

Probably not technically traditional but delicious nonetheless, these have been evolving in my classes over each Christmas season to get the balance of practicality and tastiness just right. We use the principle of stretching and folding to give the dough MAXIMUM strength so it’s able to get super light in it’s final prove.

Read through the recipe before you commence to make sure you have the right time in the right place and have fun! 😊

Mini Panettone

 Notes

This recipe makes eight mini panettone

You’ll need eight paper panettone cases, 70mm base width and 50mm high, often called 80g cases

Difficulty: Tricky to make, easy to bake

My Kitchen Temperature: 21°C/70°F

Start to finish:  6.5-7.5 hours plus overnight preferment

QUICK Timing Guide:

Day1

Mix Preferment: 8-10 Hours Rest

Day 2

Make Dough: 2 Hour Rest

First Fold: 1 Hour Rest

Second Fold: 1 Hour Rest

Divide & Shape: 1-2 hours final proof

Bake: 180°C Fan/Gas Mark 7, 15-17 minutes 

Ingredients

For the preferment

80g        Room temperature water

2g           Fresh Yeast (1g Dry Yeast)

100g      Strong white bread flour

For the final dough

20g        Fresh Yeast (10g Dry Yeast)

20g        Room temperature water

4             Medium egg yolks

20g        Honey

150g      Strong white bread flour

3g           Salt

30g        Caster sugar

1tsp       Vanilla extract

100g      Room temperature butter

For the filling

100g Soaked sultanas

100g Chopped candied orange peel

To Finish

1 Egg

Pearl Sugar

Method

 DAY 1

Ahead of time you’ll need to make your pre-ferment and soak your sultanas. I normally do these the day before and leave them overnight.

Making your preferment

Mix the water and yeast together in a large mixing bowl, add the flour and mix into a dough with your scraper. Cover with cling film and leave at room temperature to ferment for 8-10 hours.

Soaking your sultananas

Cover your sultanas with water. Leave overnight at room temperature to soak up the liquid and plump up. The following day drain them off and pat them dry on kitchen paper.

DAY 2

Making your dough

In a large mixing bowl weigh your yeast, water, egg yolks and honey. Whisk them together to dissolve the yeast.

Add the preferment, flour, salt, sugar and vanilla to the bowl and mix everything together with your dough scraper until it comes together into a dough.

Work the dough inside of the bowl for 8 minutes. Scoop your hand towards you underneath the dough, lift it, stretch forwards and put it back down as you go back in for another scoop. Repeat this circular motion, it will be sticky at first but use a dough scraper to have a tidy every now and again and bring the dough back into one place in the bowl.

Next, you’ll need to incorporate the butter and you can do this in the bowl too, to make it less messy. Put the dough into the bowl and put a third of the remaining butter on the top. Dimple it all over with your finger tips, pushing the butter into the dough. Then repeat the working motion from before, scooping up and folding in all of the butter. At first it will look as if the butter will never go into the dough but keep going and the slippery dough will take on the butter and become silky. When it does, do exactly the same thing with the other two thirds of butter. Once the butter has been taken by the dough sprinkle over your sultanas and orange zest and work them into the dough in exactly the same way. Stop when you feel like the fruit is evenly dispersed throughout the dough.

Rest the dough for three minutes, then scoop it out onto a well dusted surface. Shape it into a smooth ball by pinching a piece from the edge and folding it across the middle. Repeat this fold, working your way all around the dough making a all, 5 or 6 folds should be about right. Roll the dough back over, place it back into the bowl, dust a little flour on the top and leave to rest with a proving cloth on top for 2 hours at room temperature.

First Fold

After the dough has rested for two hours, dust the table and turn the dough out again, sticky side up. Fold the dough back into a ball again exactly as before this time 6 to 8 folds should be enough to firm it back up again. Place it back in the bowl, dust the top and rest for one hour.

Second Fold

Repeat the first fold exactly making the dough back into a firm bouncy ball. Dust, cover and rest for a further hour.

Dividing and shaping

Turn it out of the bowl upside down onto a lightly dusted surface so it is sticky side up. Press with your fingers to flatten slightly and cut into equal sized pieces. If you’d like to get them exactly the same size, you can weight the dough and divide the total weight by eight to work out what each piece of dough should weight. Then cut and weigh them as you go.

Take a piece of dough, pinch it from the edge with a finger and thumb, lift it and stretch it over the top. Repeat this all the way round to make a ball and turn it back the right way up. Place your hand over the dough ball, keep your hand on its side and bend your fingers. A combination of making big circles with your hand and pressure on the dough will allow you to roll it up into a nice tight ball. The top should always stay on the top and you should feel the dough ball become tighter as you roll. Use a light touch here as the dough can get quite sticky quite quickly, dust sparingly if you need to. Be swift, the longer you handle your dough the stickier it will become!

Dust each ball lightly as you go with flour and pop them into a paper panettone case.

Resting and baking

Cover again very loosely with cling film and allow 1-2 hours for them to prove up. Towards the end of proving preheat the oven to 180°C Fan/Gas Mark 7

Beat your egg and use this to very carefully brush over the top of each panettone, then sprinkle a little pearl sugar over the top.

Bake with maximum steam for 15-17 minutes and allow to cool on a wire rack before eating.