Jan was given a large "cake" in a box as part of her end-of-term "booty" from the parents of one of the children in her class.
Pandoro is actually an Italian bread, not cake (pan d'oro - bread of gold), but it's sweet and comes with a sachet of icing sugar. When Ally and Ben visited last weekend we got it out, dusted it with the icing sugar, and served it up.
From Wikipedia:
Pandoro (pan d'oro) is a traditional Italian sweet yeast bread, most popular around Christmas and New Year. Typically a Veronese product, pandoro is traditionally shaped like a frustum with an 8 pointed-star section.
It is often served dusted with vanilla scented icing sugar made to resemble the snowy peaks during Christmas.
Yes, the season for eating it might have passed, but we needed a good excuse to get it out of its box! (And don't worry, we were still before the best before date.)
There's a thorough description, with videos, of how to make one here. It looks extremely complicated, with four doughs and precise timing. This account introduced a new word to me: levain. Is this American for yeast? Well, not exactly. According to Wikipedia (again):
Levain is a bread leavening agent used traditionally in France and today by artisan bakeries and hobbyists around the world. It produces breads with rich aroma, pleasant structure and excellent keeping properties. Levain is a type of pre-ferment which is made in two fermentation steps from an active sourdough starter culture, flour and water. It yields a rather dry and porous dough which can be kept refrigerated for up to a week.
According to Wikipedia the formula for making pandoro took a hundred years to perfect. Has any boater attempted one in their bread making machine? (Phew. Got a boating reference in at last.)
2 comments:
Here is a very simple recipe for artisan bread developed by Mark Bittman, NY Times food columnist of The Minimalist. I make two batches a week and it is delicious. It has a bit of the tang which is more developed by levain without the fuss. It is in U.S. measurements:
3 cups unbleached white flour
1 Tablsepoon dry yeast
1 tsp salt
1 5/8 cup of very hot tap water
Mix dry ingredients together. Add hot H20. Stir well until all dry ingredients wet and massed into dough. Cover with plastic wrap. Let sit 12-18 hours.
Roll out on floured counter and knead about 5-10 times. Shape into a round Boule. Lay to rest for 2 hours on a large sheet of parchment paper and cover with a towel. About thirty minutes before the 2 hours are up, preheat oven to 425 degree with a 5 quart dutch oven and lid inside to pre-heat too. The dutch oven is a must and cannot use a subsitution. (I sprinkle my loaf with poppy, mustard, & sesame seeds and coarse salt) Remove the towel, pick up the risen loaf by the corners of the parchemnt paper and place it inside the pre-heated dutch oven.
Put the lid on and back in the oven for thirty minutes. Check progress. Remove lid from pan and finish baking until browned to your liking. Remove immediately and set on a cooling rack. Within 15 seconds your bread will begin to sing and "crack" as the steam evaporates and the crust cracks and hardens. This makes a lovely loaf with a good, crispy crust and a nice, chewy interior--holes and all. Enjoy!
Jaqueline Almdale
Pullman WA USA
Thanks Jaqueline. It certainly seems simpler than the pandoro recipe, although it's not something I would attempt! What is a dutch oven?
Halfie.
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