Italian Christmas Bread

Last month, in between baking cookies, making candy, and generally preparing for the Christmas holiday, I felt it would be a shame not to take advantage of the marvelous breads out there specifically baked at Christmastime.  Unfortunately, time got away from me, until I found myself on New Years Eve, determined to make one more bread before the year was out.

When it comes to traditional European holiday breads, however, I have a problem.  You see . . . I do not like raisins.

Do you know how many traditional European holiday breads out there call for raisins??

I did finally manage to find a few raisin-free holiday breads, and this recipe for Italian Christmas Bread happens to be one of them.  In addition to its lack of raisins, what attracted me to this bread was the selection of more unusual ingredients.  Eggnog?  Anise seed?  Hazelnuts?  I'm in!

I already had eggnog in my house, so that was easy, but acquiring some of the other ingredients was a bit of an adventure, as my shopping alternatives in this more remote area are rather limited.  To get the hazelnuts, for instance, my Senior Master Kitchen Helper and I picked through the loose mixed nuts in the produce section at the supermarket, creating a mixed nut mixture which was 80% hazelnuts by weight and 20% other nuts so as not to totally freak out the cashier.  Finding anise seed also proved a bit of a challenge, as there was none in the usual spice section.  But when I happened upon the cheap bagged spices in the Hispanic foods section, looking for something else entirely, lo and behold, there was anise seed.  (Yay!! Sometimes there are certain advantages to living close to the Mexican border . . . I can buy refills for some of my spice containers for very reasonable prices, indeed.)

This recipe ended up being more than just a flavor adventure, it ended up being a test of my general bread-making knowledge.  You see, the recipe I found was intended for a bread machine.  I do not have a bread machine, on purpose, as I do not like the crusts produced by bread machines.  (Besides, square bread is unattractive.)  But, given that the recipe consisted of little more than "put everything in the bread machine and press this button", I knew I would have to draw on my experience and a little speculation to make the bread successfully.

Ingredients

(For the bread)

1 cup eggnog, plus 1 Tablespoon eggnog (Alert!  I changed this to 1 cup eggnog, plus a separate Tablespoon of lukewarm water.)
2 Tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 Tablespoons butter, softened
1 egg
1 egg yolk
3 cups bread flour (I had some sitting in my cupboard doing nothing, so I used it.  Otherwise, I would have just used all-purpose.)
1 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast (I just used my normal yeast.)
2 Tablespoons anise seed
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 cup hazelnuts, shelled (My husband actually shelled mine using a hammer. Isn't he great?)

(For the glaze--I'm including it doubled, because that's what I ended up doing.)

1 cup powdered sugar
2 Tablespoons eggnog

Preheat an oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.  Spread out the shelled hazelnuts on a baking sheet and bake for about 5 minutes or until lightly toasted.  Remove them from the baking sheet and let them cool.  (Yes, you can turn off the oven now, as it will be a while before you are using it again for the bread.)

When my hazelnuts cooled, I decided to very coarsely chop them, figuring that whole hazelnuts in the bread might be challenging to deal with.



As I was going to need to dissolve my yeast, instead of just throwing everything into a bread machine, I substituted 1 Tablespoon of lukewarm water for that extra Tablespoon of eggnog in the recipe and used it for dissolving my yeast.  I figured that one Tablespoon less eggnog in the recipe was probably not going to make as much difference as adding extra liquid.  To be honest, it might not have been a terribly big deal to just add the extra Tablespoon of liquid, as the actual amount of flour added when mixing in a stand mixer depends entirely on how much the bread wants to take that day.  But I was feeling a little nervous when I made this recipe, knowing I was calling upon my experience instead of following directions and not knowing if my results would be acceptable.

In the bowl of my stand mixer, I added the eggnog, sugar, salt, egg, and egg yolk, then mixed them to break up the eggs.  (This is more easily done with the regular beater of a stand mixer or just by using a wisk.)  I softened the butter in the microwave, which had to be done very carefully, as the Master Kitchen Helper and Junior Taste-Tester had managed to shatter the carousel plate and we were waiting for a replacement to arrive.  Then the butter was added to the mixture and mixed in.

I added one cup of flour just to give the mixer something more solid to work with when I added the anise seed and cinnamon.  I poured in the yeast mixture and started mixing with the bread hook, adding more flour in intervals until the dough cleaned up the side of the bowl.

I was not exactly sure when I should add the hazelnuts.  The recipe said to add them to the bread machine between Knead Cycle 1 and Knead Cycle 2.  What on earth are these knead cycles?  So I guessed.  After I had mixed the bread enough for the gluten to activate, I added the nuts.  This proved to be very interesting, as they wanted to just stick to the outside of the dough and required a certain amount of coaxing to get them to mix inside.  I finally accomplished it with slow mixing and frequent stops to scrape the dough off the bread hook with a spatula, before allowing the bread hook to pick up the dough again.

Finally the dough was placed in an oiled bowl, twirled around, then turned over so the oiled surface was on the top.

Not knowing how long it would take to rise, but knowing a bread dough with eggs takes longer to rise than one without, I covered the bowl with plastic wrap and a dishtowel, then placed the bowl on a mat on the back of our pellet stove.

In the mean time, I agonized.  Should I have waited to add the hazelnuts until after the first rise?  I found other recipes for breads with nuts or fruit which added the goodies after this rise, before shaping and rising the second time.  Would the hazelnuts break up the texture of the dough enough to prevent the bread being able to form air pockets correctly?  Would the nuts absorb too much moisture and end up tasting soggy?  I finally stepped away from the computer and figured it was too late to worry about it now.  All that was left was to wait and see.

And it rose!!  (There was a serious happy dance going on in my kitchen at that moment.)  The dough rose and fluffed up nicely.

The next big question was about the pan.  I wasn't exactly sure how big a pan should be used for a recipe sized for a breadmaker.  The picture someone had posted on the website showed bread which had been baked in something like a Bundt pan, but looking at the dough, I wasn't sure there was enough quantity to justify my baking it in a Bundt pan.  However, there was definitely too much dough to fit in my normal 8"x4" loaf pan.

After staring at the dough for a while, I decided to break in one of the two new 10"x5" pans my husband had given me for Christmas.  (He was so sweet:  he called me the "Top Chef" in his life.)

Accordingly, I shaped the dough on a lightly floured board and placed it in the greased pan.

I covered the pan with plastic wrap and towel again and allowed it to rise in a warm place.

Looks like I didn't quite make my loaf evenly.

My research on converting bread machine recipes indicated that a good rule of thumb was to cook the bread for 30-40 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, so this is what I did.  (Closer to 40 minutes.)  And at this point, I could return to the original recipe, where it said, "Remove from the pan as soon as it is done baking and cool on a rack."  (This, I could do.)

When the bread was cooled, it was time to make the glaze.  I started with 1/2 cup powdered sugar and 1 Tablespoon of eggnog, as the recipe said.  After mixing, I thought the glaze was too thick, but then I realized it was probably because the eggnog had just been taken from the refrigerator.  So I decided to let glaze sit, covered with plastic wrap, for a while to get it up to room temperature.

I placed a plate beneath the rack on which the bread sat to catch drips, then drizzled the glaze on the bread.  When I was finished, I decided it needed more glaze, so I mixed up a second batch and drizzled most of that, as well.



I probably should have let the glaze sit and dry longer before cutting the bread, but I was in a hurry, so my fingers got just a bit sticky when I cut the bread.  Surprisingly enough, the larger nuts sliced nicely along with the bread, so perhaps my concerns about having whole hazelnuts in the bread were unfounded.

I had cringed just a little when I had seen how much anise seed was called for in the recipe, wondering if it would end up tasting like licorice or something.  But by the time the bread was finished, and even better, by the time it was a day or so old, I found the spice did not actually dominate the flavor of the bread.  Between the cinnamon, the hazelnuts, the anise seed, and the eggnog glaze, there was a nice blend of flavors which actually seemed more subtle than I had expected.

My husband was a little disappointed in the flavor.  After eating the "in your face" spice bread from the Netherlands, he felt the Italian Christmas bread couldn't hold a candle to it.  But I actually preferred this one to the Dutch bread, mostly because I prefer a medium texture in bread to a more dense texture.

I took the bread to the community New Years Eve party as part of our contribution to the snack table (along with cupcakes, brownies, and cake balls dipped in chocolate my Kitchen Artiste in Training insisted on making from the round cake pop molds she got for Christmas.)  Food was plentiful enough the bread wasn't all eaten (no surprise, really, as some people avoid bread on principle), but that meant my daughters and I were able to snitch pieces for snacks over the next few days.  Yum, yum!