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Soup baked into bread

It was a dark and stormy night… We slept on, blissfully unaware but when we awoke, the world was white and hushed. Mist shivered on the bare trees and the road had fallen silent.
After a long, long while, we heard the distant growl of the snowplow. It came nearer, nearer, And each time it rumbled by the house, the driveway became a little more impenetrable. We were stuck. Nothing that a good shovel and a bit of elbow grease wouldn’t solve but it had started raining cats and dogs and we hoped the rain would do the work for us.
So we stayed in and I looked for something to cheer me up. I had made a big batch of bright green pea soup the day before (from a recipe I found ages ago in The Three Ingredient Cookbook by Jenny White and that we love it so much I have made it countless times since) and I recalled reading that in the country, when they have leftover vegetable soup, they sometimes mix it with ripe starter, add flour until they get the right consistency and bake it.
I had ripe starter galore (never a problem in my house), I had flour, I had soup, so I decided to have fun and bake a pea pod bread!

Ingredients:
For the soup (these proportions are enough for the bread and for soup for 2 the night before)
2 bags of frozen peas (454 g x 2) (for the soup, I like the Trader Joe’s brand because the peas are tiny and never floury but if you are going to make bread with them, maybe floury isn’t that bad! Anyway I only had the regular supermarket brand in the freezer, so that’s what I used)
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
1 bit of butter
500 ml water or broth (just enough to cover the peas. Bouillon cubes can be used if broth is not available)
For the bread (enough for 1 big bread and 1 roll)
186 g mature firm starter (60% hydration) (the starter I used was 50% white whole wheat)
620 g unbleached all-purpose flour
640 g soup (mixed with an immersion blender)
salt (I can’t give you the precise amount because it depends on how much you salted the soup. You’ll just have to taste. I know I underestimated the proportion)
freshly ground pepper (to taste)

By the way, even if you don’t plan to make pea pod bread, I would still encourage you to make the soup. It is such an easy and tasty recipe to have in a recipe repertoire that it’s worth trying to see if you like it and, the day after, eat the leftover with beet chips. It’s so delicious that, by right, Julia Child should have invented it! Maybe she did, for all I know…

Beet chips are no-fat and easy to make : wash and peel some raw beets (I happen to love the taste of yellow beet but any color would work), slice them really thin, put the slices on a half-sheet pan covered with foil, drizzle lemon juice over them (I used Meyer lemons which I had bought by mistake thinking they were organic and couldn’t use for baking because their skin isn’t “zest-able”) and bake 2 or 3 hours in the oven at a very, very low temperature. Sprinkle some salt over the chips when they come out of the oven and enjoy! By themselves, beet chips are pretty addictive but with the soup (just lukewarm is fine), especially with this (Meyer-)lemony aftertaste, wow!

Method:

For the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a medium-sized saucepan
  2. Add the garlic and let it soften a bit (but not color)
  3. Add the frozen peas and mix with a wooden spoon (I cover the pot half-way with its lid at this point to get the peas to thaw faster)
  4. When the peas are more or less all separate, pour water or broth to cover
  5. Let simmer about 5 minutes, uncovered
  6. Add pepper, if desired
  7. Mix with an immersion blender
  8. Eat hot or warm (in the spring or summer, the soup can be eaten cold with chopped fresh mint)
  9. If using the soup for the bread, make sure it cools to room temperature. Conversely, if the soup has been kept in the fridge, put it in the microwave for a few seconds to bring it to room temperature. (I had made the soup the day before and even though it had remained at room temp – 64ºF -, it was pretty cold considering the fact that the flour came from the garage and was at 53ºF. I wanted the dough to come out at 76º F. So I heated up the soup to about 120º taking care to mix it with a bit of cold flour before letting it touch the starter)

For the bread

  1. Read above, step 9, to adjust the temperature of the soup, keeping in mind that the desired dough temperature is 76ºF
  2. Mix starter, flour and soup until medium soft consistency and low gluten development (short mix)
  3. Taste to adjust salt and pepper
  4. Transfer to the counter and knead by hand for a few seconds, then put in an oiled dough bucket or bin and let it ferment 40 minutes
  5. At 40 minutes, take the dough out, give it a 4-point fold and put it back in the bin or bucket
  6. Let it ferment another 40 minutes
  7. At that point, I had 1442 g of dough. I divided it in 1 1-kg piece and 1 442-g piece.
  8. Pre-shape the big piece as a boule or as a cylinder. Divide the smaller one in 6 small boules Let rest covered for 15 minutes
  9. Shape the six boules tightly to make them look like peas (only 5 will go into the pod, the other one will be used for tasting)
  10. Shape the big piece first as a tight batard, sprinkle flour along the middle and crease it with a thin rolling pin, pushing the bottom of the dough against the counter to make it flat but taking care not to tear it. Remove the pin and dust the dough at the bottom with some more flour, put 5 of the little boules into the crease (taking care to flour them on the sides where they touch, so that they remain separate when baking)
  11. Set the peapod and the small boule to ferment, right side up, in a big plastic bag on a half-sheet pan covered with semolina-dusted parchment paper
  12. Pre-heat the oven to 470ºF/243ºC with a cast-iron pan at the bottom and a baking stone on the middle shelf
  13. After 40 minutes, check the loaves and if ready (the indentation made with your finger springs back only slowly), score them as desired, pour 1 cup of water in the hot cast-iron pan (watch for the steam!) and bake for 5 minutes at 470ºF, spraying some more water into the oven twice in the first 5 minutes
  14. Lower the temperature to 440ºF/227ºC and bake for 20 minutes, then turn the loaves around so that they don’t brown more on one side than the other and bake another 15 to 20 minutes, or until their internal temperature reaches about 210ºF/99ºC
  15. Cool on a wire rack.

Boule for tasting: the crust

Now comes the $100 question: what does the bread taste like? Well, surprisingly enough, not at all like soup! It tastes half-way between a chestnut flour bread and a sweet potato bread and since the soup wasn’t sweet, it can only be because the wild yeast found some sugar in the peas and chomped on it.
Perhaps because of that sweet taste (which wasn’t perceptible when I was mixing the dough), the bread isn’t quite salted enough. However the black pepper makes up for it, quite serendipitously, by giving it a welcome bite.
So, yes, I like the bread but (there is a but!)… I am disappointed by its color. I wanted a green bread, if not the bright green of Irish soda breads on St-Patrick’s Day, at least some specks of emerald here and there to make up for the grayness outside. But, as you can see from the picture, the bread is greenish at best.
Oh well! Perhaps next time I should reserve some of the peas and hand-mixed them in the dough at the end (maybe even still frozen peas which would thaw and bake in the bread and so keep their gorgeous color?). But that will be for another snowday…

Boule for tasting: the crumb
The Pea Pod Bread goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast for Yeastpotting.

Chocolate Cherry Lean Brioche with Hazelnuts

Looking for a reasonably healthful holiday bread? Well, look no further. This little brioche might just do the trick! It is rich in chocolate, dried cherries and hazelnuts but rather low on fat and sugar, completely butter-free and made with a healthy proportion of white whole wheat… To top it all, it doesn’t contain a single speck of commercial yeast. What’s not to like?
Of course it doesn’t compare to a pan d’oro but, for health reasons, who would eat (or make for that matter) a pan d’oro more than a few times a year? My family likes to munch on something chocolatey while watching the kids open their presents. This year, I think I’ll make this brioche (but I’ll double the proportions).
The idea comes from a slim French book entitled Les Pains des Quatre-Saisons, an appealing compilation of bread recipes (sometimes with accompanying memories) contributed by readers of an organic gardening magazine.
I took some liberties with the recipe to adapt it both to our taste and to the family health requirements.

Ingredients (for one smallish brioche):
For the dough
150 g unbleached all-purpose flour
100 g white whole wheat flour
20 g agave syrup
1 egg, beaten + 1 other, beaten as well for the wash
50 g milk (you might need more according to how thirsty your flour is), at room temperature
50 g roasted hazelnut oil (the hazelnut oil contributes nicely to the taste but, if not available, a neutral vegetable oil – not canola – will do), at room temperature (soft butter is used in the original recipe)
40 g mature white starter
1 pinch of salt
For the garnish
60 g hazelnuts, roasted and skinned, chopped
50 g dried cherries, quick-soaked in warm milk and drained
50 g good quality dark chocolate chips, chopped

Method:

  1. Pour the flour in a large bowl
  2. Make a well in the center and pour in: milk, salt, agave syrup, egg, starter
  3. Mix well, adding milk as necessary
  4. When incorporated and gluten is starting to develop, progressively add the oil
  5. Continue mixing until smooth and flexible (but the dough should be rather firm)
  6. Ferment in a tightly covered bowl until doubled in volume (in my case, it took 12 hours @ 68ºF/20ºC)
  7. When the dough is ready, preheat the oven to 400ºF/204ºC, making sure there is an empty cast-iron (or other metal) pan at the bottom and a baking stone (if available) on the middle rack
  8. With a rolling pin, flatten the dough into a rectangle (0.20″/0.5 cm thick), spread the garnish on the rectangle, taking care to stay away from the edges
  9. Roll the dough tight, as you would a jelly roll and pinch the ends closed
  10. Shape as desired and set on a parchment-covered baking sheet, brush with the egg wash and let rise another 40 minutes inside a tightly closed plastic bag
  11. Pour 1 cup of water in waiting cast-iron (or metal) pan and slide the brioche into the oven
  12. Spray the oven once with water and close the door
  13. After 20 minutes, rotate the brioche
  14. Bake another 30 minutes and cool on wire rack.

Raisins (soaked in rum or not) could be used instead of cherries, white chocolate instead of dark and, if opting for raisins, you might want to use walnuts instead of hazelnuts and to spice up the whole thing with some cinnamon. You can also use only all-purpose flour and replace the agave syrup by sugar (which was in the original recipe). However you end up making it, enjoy!

Jeff Hamelman on maintaining a rye starter

Jeff Hamelman, author of Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes as well as Bakery Director and Certified Master Baker at the King Arthur Flour Company, to whom I had forwarded a reader’s question about maintaining a rye starter, was kind enough to send the following information in reply:

“We do feed our cultures twice daily at the King Arthur Bakery, seven times per week. Aren’t those cultures lucky to be in a bakery that requires them to be healthy every day? For maintaining cultures when they are not going to be used daily, each person has to decide for him/herself what approach to take. I know people who bake just on weekends who feed their cultures twice daily every day—that’s a level of commitment I don’t think I could take on! On the other extreme, there are people who proudly make bread with a culture that has been refrigerated and utterly neglected for weeks, and claim that their bread is just fine. This is mentally indigestible to me (the bread is probably pretty indigestible too).
We must first and fundamentally acknowledge that our culture is a living environment, and like us, will be in best health with regular meals. That said, it’s just not practical to feed a culture 14 times per week if it is only going to be used once or twice a week. In that case, I would give at least four feeds per week, more if possible, and spread them out to fit one’s schedule. For example, one might feed the culture Monday morning before going to work and then refrigerate it in the evening. Then do the same Wednesday and Friday, and then Friday evening make levain for Saturday baking. I’m kind of making this up as I write, but some sort of regimen like that may be suitable. There are, of course, other considerations, such as time of year, ambient temperature and humidity, and so on, so some adjustments may be necessary along the way.
What kinds of adjustments? Well, let’s assume we want the culture to ripen in 12 hours. In winter perhaps our build here in Vermont might be:
Mature culture 100 g
Flour 150 g
Water 90 g
After 12 hours, all looks good, the culture has domed nicely and is fully fragrant and ripe. Come summer, the kitchen is so much warmer and more humid that the culture would ripen in eight hours if we continue to use those proportions. We might therefore reduce the amount of mature culture in the build to 50 or 75 grams, or whatever is required so that the culture is mature in 12 hours. As bakers, we have to be very attentive.
My good friend James MacGuire always brought his culture with him on vacation, and as he delightfully recounts, he could never stay in the same hotel twice because he had left such a floury mess, not to mention that weird smelling paste that was in the bin. He now has another method—one that I’ve not tried, but James is not just a great master, he is also completely committed to quality, and he wouldn’t do this if it didn’t work: he feeds his culture, maybe a bit stiffer than usual, and then after an hour refrigerates it. It is, of course, unripe at this stage, which means there is a nutrient supply available during the refrigeration phase. I’m sure there are other strategies for long term storage, but there is one important consideration regardless of the method used: once you’ve returned home, give the culture a couple of days at room temperature with two feedings daily to reinvigorate it.”
Jeff will monitor the comments to this post, so if you have any questions, please feel free to add your grain of salt as we say in French.
Thank you, Jeff!

Rhubarb, Ginger & Honey Muffins

It isn’t the season for rhubarb, so why am I talking about these muffins? Well, I found the recipe in a great book I just got in the mail, The BloggerAid Cook Book: Changing the Face of Famine. It isn’t a bread book, not even a regular cookbook which I might ordinarily have bought but it is an important book because it helps each of us do something about world hunger. When we buy the book, all the proceeds go to the World Food Program‘ School Meals Programme, which benefits an average of 22 million hungry children a year.
In countries where school attendance is low, the promise of at least one nutritious meal each and every day boosts enrollment and promotes regular attendance and we all know what difference education can make in preserving the world for our own kids and grand-kids. If you have read Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson, you have learned this fact first-hand and if you haven’t, you are in for an eye-opening experience when you do (that book was one of the best ones I read last summer).
In the poorest parts of the world, school feeding programs can double primary school enrollment in one year and among the principal beneficiaries are girls, who otherwise may never be given an opportunity to learn.
Four hundred millions of kids (many more than the 22 millions WFP is currently in a position to help) suffer from hunger around the world, so it is tempting to think that our purchase of that one book will not make a difference. But it will. Sometimes pennies are what stand between a child going to bed hungry and a child going to sleep as we want our kids to go to sleep and anyway, if all our purchases combined only helped feed one single child, wouldn’t it still be worth it?
So please consider purchasing the book, for your relatives, for your friends but most of all for the millions of kids who need help. If you were in their parents’ situation, you’d beg us to buy the book for your children’s sake. So let’s just do it! Because we can… Most of us food bloggers really can. Right?
Back to the book. What I love about it – besides the fact that it helps hungry children everywhere – is that it is a compendium of recipes gleaned from fellow bloggers around the world. If I had known about the initiative, I would have gladly participated. But I hadn’t and I didn’t. The only thing I can do now is let others know about it, so that they can purchase the book too.
I won’t list the contributors, there are too many and quite a few of them have gorgeous blogs which you’ll enjoy discovering. I find moving that so many are from developing countries, especially India. Hunger is in their backyard in a way that it is not here in North America (even though we have our share of poor kids) and they rose to the occasion by bearing testimony to what they see every day of their life and by inviting us to make a difference. Let’s do it!
This blog is mostly about bread and there aren’t a lot of bread recipes in the BloggerAid book but there is another muffin recipe that I will make (avocado corn) and a baked cinnamon apple pancake that sounds really delicious, and then there are recipes for many other dishes which have nothing to do with bread. My copy of the book is full of little flags for recipes I intend to try.
The rhubarb, ginger and honey muffins drew my attention because I love ginger with a passion and I am also extremely fond of rhubarb. I have in my freezer some cut up rhubarb from last year’s bounty but I also have rhubarb jam which I had made in early summer and that’s what I used here. If you don’t have access to rhubarb in any shape or form before spring, I would use applesauce, sweetened or not according to taste.
The recipe has been contributed to BloggerAid by fellow blogger David Hall from Book the Cook. I adapted it somewhat.

Ingredients (for 6 big muffins or 12 small ones):
100 g rhubarb jam (or applesauce) (David uses fresh rhubarb simmered in honey)
125 g unbleached all-purpose flour
120 g white whole wheat flour
60 g rolled oats
5 g baking soda
25 g crystallized ginger, roughly chopped
200 g plain yogurt (I used wholemilk, not no-fat or low fat)
50 g grapeseed or other neutral oil (David uses melted butter)
35 g liquid honey
bran for topping, if desired (I had spelt bran left over from hand-milling some spelt and I used that)

Method:

  1. Pre-heat the oven to 350ºF/177ºC
  2. In a large bowl, sift the flours and baking soda
  3. Stir in the oats and ginger
  4. In another bowl, mix yogurt, egg, oil and honey
  5. Pour into the flour and oat mixture
  6. Combine thoroughly. If the mixture looks a little dry, add a little milk until it falls easily from the spoon (I did add some milk)
  7. Pour into muffin liners, sprinkle with bran (if using) and bake for 30 to 40 minutes until risen and golden brown. Eat slightly warm.

David says his daughter loves these little muffins. I tried them on some of my youngest grandchildren (age 3 and 4) and they gobbled them up in spite of the (slightly) spicy ginger taste. Since they are nutritious, I was quite happy to see them disappear.

These rhubarb, ginger and honey muffins go to Susan, from Wild Yeast for Yeastpotting where I hope they’ll convince many more people to buy the book!

Pan d’oro


Can you imagine I had never had pan d’oro (literally “gold bread”, also spelled pandoro) until I took the Artisan III workshop at SFBI last summer? I had seen pictures of it but never seen one “in the flesh”, much less tasted it. Didier Rosada, our instructor, told me that pan d’oro was excellent and that he preferred it to panettone.
Better than panettone? I love panettone, so I couldn’t imagine that I would ever say the same thing. But we made both panettone and pan d’oro during the class and, lo and behold, pan d’oro has become my favorite. It is light and delicate and it has great aromas, thanks to all the preferments.
Plus, even though it is traditionally a holiday “bread”, mostly eaten in Italy during Christmas and New Year, its star shape makes it a gorgeous addition to any party table. It is served dusted with confectioner’s sugar, as can be seen on this picture taken during the class.

The reason mine is still in its birthday suit on the first picture is that it went straight from the cooling rack to the freezer. Some bakers say that, if well wrapped, it can keep for a month or longer at room temperature, but Didier has seen mold develop that way and told us that, if we couldn’t make it one or two days before the intended date of consumption (which would be the best), then we should freeze it. So freeze it I did.

Four things you need to know before you decide to make a pan d’oro:

  1. Three different doughs go into the final dough. All need to ferment at 80ºF/27ºC. So before doing anything, check to see how you’d go about maintaining this temperature in your kitchen in the winter. It could be that your oven (turned off but with the light on) offers the perfect environment or that you can let your doughs rise next to your furnace and that they will be fine. I used the proofbox the Man built for me last year out of a storage plastic box equipped with a light bulb and a thermostat. Steve B. from Bread Cetera kindly gave us the idea and provided detailed explanations on how to go about building this home proofer. Thank you, Steve! It works like a charm and I use it frequently in the wintertime when the temperature in my kitchen never rises above 64ºF/18ºC.
  2. In making the pan d’oro, except for the temperature issue, timing is everything. You need to make yourself a time-line and stick to it like glue. As Didier says, with other artisan breads, you can relax – within certain limits, of course, briefly think of something else, go pour yourself a cup of coffee while the mixer does the work. Not so with the pan d’oro: the preferments must reach maturity at the same time and since the final dough can overdevelop in the blink of an eye (because of all the preferments), you need to watch it like a hawk.
  3. Since it is a high-sugar dough, you need to use either osmotolerant instant yeast (SAP Instant Gold for instance) or 15 to 20% more of your regular instant yeast than the quantity indicated below (according to Didier, that works fine also but I haven’t tried it as I had bought SAP Instant Gold from the King Arthur store when I attended Jeff Hamelman’s Whole Grains workshop in Vermont this past October).
  4. Didier recommends cooling the pan d’oro on a screen if you want it to keep its beautiful star shape. So the Man went to the hardware store and got whatever he needed to make a screened cooling rack that he then set between two chairs. He was a bit afraid that it would come loose under the combined weight of the loaves and that all the beautiful pane d’oro would come crashing to the floor but it held fast.

As you can see from the picture (please ignore my grandchildren’s little red kaleidoscope which had rolled under the table. I hadn’t seen it but the camera did!), there is only one true pan d’oro and the other loaves look different. That is because I wasn’t sure I was going to actually succeed making a pan d’oro.
So I only bought one pan d’oro pan (from amazon). For the others, I used a kouglof pan (which a kindly blog friend sent to me from France last year) and a brioche pan I must have had for the past forty years. For the four little ones, I used muffin pan liners.
Right off the bat, I can tell you that the little ones were very disappointing. Forget the idea of making tiny individual pane d’oro. They just aren’t the same (probably because the ratio of crust to crumb is so different that it totally changes the taste).

The tiny black speckles are the vanilla seeds

The kouglof-shaped pan d’oro has yet to be sliced open but we did sample the brioche one yesterday (it was heavenly) and here is how it looks inside…

…as compared to the crumb of the one we made in class using the pan d’oro mold:

Because of the shape of the brioche pan, I didn’t get the same lift as I did with the one baked in the pan d’oro mold. So the crumb is probably a bit denser. Didier had told us that it would happen but that it was still fine to bake pan d’oro in this type of mold if we didn’t have the regular ones. And indeed it was.

So, back to the time-line: the pan d’oro needs to proof overnight – @ 70ºF/21ºC for 10 to 12 hours, @ a higher temperature, a bit less time, @ a lower one, it can take up to 16 hours before it domes.

In my case I knew I was going to proof it overnight at 70ºF in the proofbox and I knew I had to bake it in the morning of the day after or at the latest in the very early afternoon as I had to go out later on.
I decided I would try to get it into the proofer at around 9 PM. Working backwards from there, I calculated that taking into account mixing and fermenting time I needed about 11 hours to get everything ready.
I thus started with the levain feed at around 10:00 AM and used the following time-line:

  1. Feed the levain and leave it to ferment for 3 to 4 hours @80 to 85ºF/27 to 29ºC
  2. Make the first dough (using the levain) and let it ferment 2 hours @80ºF/27ºC
  3. Thirty minutes later, make the second dough (using instant yeast) and let it ferment one and a half hour @80ºF/27ºC (it is essential that it be ready as the same time as the first dough)
  4. One hour and a half after mixing the second dough, mix the third dough (using both the first and the second doughs) and let it ferment 2 to 2 ½ hours @80ºF/27ºC until it is 3 ½ to 4 times its initial volume
  5. Make the final dough (using the third dough and all the other ingredients as indicated below)
  6. Let it ferment one hour @80ºF/27ºC and give it a fold
  7. Let it ferment one more hour @80ºF/27ºC, divide and shape
  8. Proof overnight until the top of the dough reaches more or less the top of the mold
  9. Bake and cool.

Ingredients (for three pane d’oro):
For the levain (total weight needed: 130 g)
45 g unbleached all-purpose flour
22.5 g water
63 g mature white starter (100% hydration)

For the first dough (total weight needed: 325 g)

  • 90 g unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 45 g water
  • 36 g eggs, beaten
  • 22 g sugar
  • 130 g levain

For the second dough (total weight needed: 106 g)

  • 55 g unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 16 g water
  • 22 g eggs, beaten
  • 11 g sugar
  • 1.1 g osmotolerant instant yeast (or up to 1.3% regular instant yeast)

For the third dough (total weight needed: 570 g)

  • 81 g unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 36.5 g eggs, beaten
  • 16.25 g sugar
  • 5 g butter, at room temperature
  • 325 g first dough
  • 106 g second dough

For the final dough (total weight 1500 g)

  • 300 g unbleached all-purpose flour (inexplicably and even though my calculations were accurate – they were double-checked by the Man who is a math wizard – I ended up adding twice 50 g to this amount as I was getting a batter, not a dough, after the first third of the eggs was added. I knew it was going to happen within certain limits but the dough was way over and could not have been rescued without the addition of some flour)
  • 225 g eggs, beaten
  • 144 g sugar
  • 15 g liquid honey
  • 6 g salt (I added another pinch after putting it the additional flour)
  • 570 g third dough
  • 225 g butter, at room temperature
  • 15 g cocoa butter (I didn’t have any, so I did as Didier suggested and used white chocolate chips, crushed. He says it helps make nice holes in the crumb but can also be omitted)
  • 1 vanilla pod, sliced open and seeds scraped out (you only use the seeds)

Method:

  1. Mix the levain and let it ferment as indicated above in step 1 of the time-line
  2. Mix the fist dough and let it ferment as indicated in step 2 (low gluten development)
    All the videoclips were filmed during the workshop
  3. Mix the second dough and let it ferment as indicated in step 3 (low gluten development as well)
  4. Mix the third dough and let it ferment as indicated in step 4
  5. Cream the butter incorporating as much air as possible (that’s what will give its fluffiness to the pan d’oro); when done, add the vanilla seeds and the cocoa butter or white chocolate chips, if using; mix until incorporated and reserve (at room temperature).
  6. Mix the final dough. This step is very delicate as the ingredients must go in in the prescribed order, i.e. first the flour and salt, then half of the eggs, then one third of the sugar (no water at all), mix some. When incorporated and as gluten develops, add the second third of the sugar and a bit of the eggs (so that the sugar doesn’t draw too much water from the dough), mix again.
    When incorporated and as gluten develops further, add the last of the sugar and the remaining eggs. Mix 3 minutes at first speed, then add the honey (for flavor and to keep the crumb moist), then go for one touch of second speed. Didier explained that, by doing it this way, the dough acquires strength despite almost 30% of sugar, lots of eggs and, at the end, a lot of butter. If we tried to make it adding all the ingredients in one step, il would never work, just as if you suddenly put five bags of flour on someone’s shoulders, the person would collapse. By doing it by steps, you not only build up the strength, you also build up the flavors.
    So before you add the butter, make sure the dough is pretty strong. Go back to first speed until it is smooth and you get the gluten structure you want. If the dough starts to collapse, it means you put too much sugar at once. You can then keep mixing but you risk overheating the dough when the gluten is fully developed.
    When you do add the butter, do it on first speed.

  7. When all is incorporated and the dough cleans the bowl, take it out to a bin (or a dough bucket) and let it ferment for 2 hours as indicated in the time-line, step 6, with a fold at the end of the first hour
  8. Divide at 500 g in a tight ball (if using a kouglof or brioche mold, divide at 450 g. That’s what I did and that’s why I had dough left over to make the small pane d’oro)
  9. Proof overnight as indicated in the time-line, step 8
  10. Bake in 325ºF/163ºC oven for 40 to 45 minutes (with only 2 seconds of steaming at the beginning, i.e. a few sprays of water)
  11. Invert on a screen to cool
  12. Sprinkle confectioner’s sugar on the pan d’oro before serving.

Now I know all this sounds terribly complicated and intimidating and as I was mixing the third dough (especially when it started turning into a batter), I truly started wondering why I was doing this to myself and then the dough started to coalesce and it finally reached the point where I was happy with it and I set it to rise through the night.
But frankly I had no clue whether or not it would rise. I was hopeful and concerned at the same time. That night, I must have dreamed of the pan d’oro because it is the first thing I thought of upon waking up! But everything had worked out and the pane d’oro all looked perky and in the end, I really like the way they came out. Relatively speaking, making the pan d’oro is a little bit like childbirth. You don’t necessarily enjoy the process but you love the result!

The pan d’oro goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.