Enriched dough help please!

Question

I tried making panettone last night - although the recipe is really more similar to brioche.. 2 eggs, 5 egg yolks, 250g butter, 500g flour. I kneaded the dough (by hand)for 10 mins as the recipe said ..but it was 'streaky' and hadn't got to the silky stage.. My house is quite cold so I put it in the airing cupboard to rise, which may have been a bit too warm - the dough rose very well but was leaking butter and was incredibly greasy when I was adding the fruit & peel before the second rise.. It took ages to bake and has turned out very heavy and cakey..

Did I knead it too much? Or not enough? And I'm thinking that I should have left it somewhere cooler to rise..?

Answer 1

Enriched doughs usually need either a whole lot of kneading or a whole lot of proofing time (or both - from memory Richard Bertinet kneads his brioche dough for about 10 minutes then proofs for 14 hours).

One other trick is to add the butter after initial kneading so that you can form some gluten first. This should make the resulting bread less 'cakey'.