above, a peek inside the sourdough panettone shows good aeration, a rich dark and soft crust, a rich yellow crumb and a scattering of fruit

The Essential Ingredient in Melbourne’s Prahran Market is more than just a retailer, it’s a place which really celebrates the joy to be found in cooking.

Under one roof, you’ll find not only an outstanding selection of cookware, cookbooks and ingredients, but also a cookery school which is really well-equipped and which offers an interesting range of classes for every season, along with staff who seem to have perfectly judged the right balance between offering assistance and leaving you to browse.

Their achievement is simply inspirational, and I was delighted to teach an Italian Baking class there on one of my visits to Melbourne.

Italy was my first inspiration in baking, and the ingredients and methods still hold my fascination and respect. The flavour and texture found in the very best Italian baking, is characterised by its utter clarity and simplicity, and I am yet to find a cook in Italy who doesn’t bake with precision and deliberation.

At Essential Ingredient I was able to teach and demonstrate some of the bread recipes I developed for Giorgio Locatelli’s restaurant Locanda Locatelli here in London, as well as other classic Italian breads and pastries. The class was directed at both home and commercial bakers and restaurant pastry chefs and attracted a range of ages and abilities. Through an intense and hands-on experience, focusing on traditional methods, we made a biga, which we used in making an open-textured stirato Torinese, a focaccia Genovese and a sourdough pannetone; as well as farinata di ceci and crisp amaretti.

above, the cut top of the sourdough panettone, and you can see the crumb that burst through during baking.

Italian flour, and making a biga

Bakers in Italy often use a type of flour that contains a mixture of imported wheat and local grain to increase the elasticity and resilience in the dough. Italian flour is divided into categories according to the size of the flour particles, with ‘O’ a coarse granulated flour, ‘OO’ (doppio zero) a medium fine flour, and ‘OOO’ a very fine flour for delicate work. Then, within these categories, the miller will produce flour suitable for different uses. So a miller will produce a OO best suited for pasta, as well as another OO best suited for pizza. But they’re not interchangeable, and this is where the confusion and problems arise. Adding a small proportion of strong white flour to a OO pasta flour (the most common Italian flour found around the world) is the best work around.

Generally in Italy, when bakers talk about “a biga” they mean a piece of dough left from the previous day’s baking, much like the French use the term “pâte fermenté” or fermented dough. A common practice used in Italy is to mix the dough very, very tightly – with very little water and a tiny amount of yeast – and allow it to ferment and soften slowly at room temperature overnight.

The following day a small amount of additional flour, a tiny amount of water, malt extract, sometimes lard (strutto) and salt are added, and mixed into a refreshed dough that ferments very quickly. As traditional Italian flour does not produce dough with the elasticity or resilience seen in the strong baker’s flour we are used to, this method protects the available gluten. This is because a tight dough ferments very slowly, therefore placing less stress on the structure of the dough, by constraining the amount of gassing that is possible, and leaving the dough with some elasticity and resilience at the end.

This method can be used with commercial yeast or a leaven (sourdough) process, and is particularly good for the latter as it produces a very lively dough, comparable to a commercially yeasted dough in its gassing power. Similar processes were used throughout Europe up until the late 1800s (in the UK they were called ferment, sponge and dough) but colder countries tended to rely on a batter mixtures as these would have fermented more easily at lower temperatures. At the Melbourne class, we used both a commercially yeasted biga and a leaven-based (sourdough) one for different recipes.

above, the cut section of sourdough panettone peeled away from the baking paper.

An open-textured stirato Torinese and a focaccia Genovese

Bakers in Italy, like bakers around the world, tend to want to get the most variations possible from the one house dough. A plain white dough made to the method above can be used in different ways, and we used it to make both a type of giant grissini called a stirato Torinese, as well as a bubbly, aerated focaccia Genovese.

Farinata di ceci

Until the early 1900s, food made with fine white wheat flour was something many people in continental Europe only aspired to. It was expensive, and relatively few people could afford it. Other grains and starches were relied upon, and in Italy it was common to find street vendors selling a simple ‘pancake’ that served as a bread snack. In the north of Italy, the two main street foods were the savoury and salty Farinata (made with chick pea flour) and the sweet Castagnaccio (made with chestnuts).

Amaretti

It was a great pleasure to pass on the ‘secret’ to making light, crisp amaretti biscuits at the class (and there will be a recipe elsewhere on this site in due course). Sometimes cornmeal is added, sometimes semolina, but ours were kept plain and simple with just nuts, apricot kernels, egg white and sugar.

Panettone

This was the greatest challenge of the day, and not just for the students ! In Italy, factories dedicated to the manifacture of ‘industrial’ panettone have the process down to a fine art; but replicating this in anything more like a domestic kitchen is more testing. We used a biga I’d started the previous day, made with a leaven (sourdough), enriched with egg yolks and sugar and left overnight to rise, with the final dough topped with up with more eggs, butter, sugar, flour, and fruit. In Italy, panettone is flavoured using a mixture of natural essences (or often artificial ones, combining natural and fake in a relaxed and care-free way). We used natural aromas to create the flavour.

The Essential Ingredient: store and cookery school
Prahran Market, Elizabeth Street, South Yarra 3141 VIC
Telephone: (03) 9827 9047
www.theessentialingredient.com.au
Further stores in Albury, NSW; Canberra, ACT; Newcastle, NSW; Orange, NSW; and Rozelle (Sydney, NSW)

above, a panettone made with a natural leaven, and without commercial yeast