Grammy’s Italian Easter Bread

by Dorothy Reinhold on March 1, 2013


Print This Post Print This Post Grammy's Italian Easter Bread -- flour, eggs, butter and love! | ShockinglyDelicious.com

Am I allowed to say — and will you believe it if I tell you? — that my Grammy Zito made the best Easter bread on the planet?

Soft, warm, fragrant, eggy, wonderful Easter bread, kneaded by hand, lovingly, in her Italian kitchen. We sliced it thin, slathered it thickly with butter (back in the day when we all weren’t afraid of butter!), and ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

It makes wonderful toast, sandwiches and snacks.

Grammy's Italian Easter Bread on Shockingly DeliciousAnd the recipe, observed and recorded by my mother, now has a permanent home in my recipe box. While I don’t often enough have time to make bread entirely by hand, I still crave the flavor of my grandmother’s bread; Easter Sunday just wouldn’t be the same without it.

So with a little tinkering with ingredient amounts, I can easily make it in my automatic bread machine. I use a modified strategy of letting the machine do the kneading and first rise, and then I take over for the second rise and baking in the oven. But you can certainly do the whole shebang in the machine if you like.

I hope you haul out your bread machine and try it, too. My usual top rating is 5 stars. To this, I give 10 stars!

Grammy's Italian Easter Bread on Shockingly DeliciousHappy Easter!

Recipe: Grammy’s Italian Easter Bread

Summary: Craving the flavor of old-time Italian Easter bread, made the easy way, using the automatic bread machine.

Ingredients

  • 1 package (2 1/4 teaspoons) dry yeast (I used SAF-Instant Yeast, so no need to proof or dissolve)
  • 3 cups bread flour
  • 1/3 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 tablespoon melted butter (I used Kerrygold)
  • 1/2 cup milk, scalded and then cooled (may need additional milk; see note below*)

Instructions

  1. Easiest way: Add ingredients to bread machine in order recommended by manufacturer. Turn machine on (White Bread setting) and let it go! (Check dough consistency early in kneading cycle and add up to 1/4 cup more milk if needed to achieve correct consistency; see note below.) Skip to step #7.
  2. The Shockingly Delicious usual way: Add ingredients to bread machine in order recommended by manufacturer. Turn machine on to dough setting, and let the bread maker mix, knead and go through the first rise (something like 80 minutes total). (Check dough consistency early in kneading cycle and add up to 1/4 cup more milk if needed to achieve correct consistency. See note below.)
  3. When it beeps and is done with dough cycle, remove dough, shape in a round, place it on a parchment paper-covered baking sheet, and set in a warm place for the second rise.Grammy's Italian Easter Bread after second rise on Shockingly Delicious
  4. Allow to rise for 30-60 minutes, undisturbed, until it doubles in size.Grammy's Italian Easter Bread in the oven on Shockingly Delicious
  5. Heat oven to 350F degrees, and bake loaf for 30 minutes. The top will be brown and it will sound hollow if you thump the bottom.
  6. Remove from oven, transfer loaf to a rack and cool completely before cutting. (If you allow it to cool while still on the baking sheet, the condensation from cooling will make the bottom soggy. So move it!)
  7. Cut and serve with butter (we enjoy Kerrygold unsalted), and enjoy!

Quick notes

Follow the instructions that come with your bread machine. Some makers recommend yeast first, some recommend yeast last, etc. You’ll get the best result if you scan the little pamphlet that came with the machine and heed it.

*Dough consistency

Grammy's Italian Easter Bread on Shockingly DeliciousI made this bread many times before, and 1/2 cup milk was the right amount. The other day I made it and the dough wasn’t holding together correctly, and looked dry to me during the mixing/kneading phase in the bread machine, so I added more milk, a tablespoon at a time, until it looked right (an additional 1/4 cup total). Why did it work some times, and not the other? It could have been that my eggs were old and so were drier and less liquidy. It could have been that this time I made it on a super-dry winter day, so my flour naturally contained less moisture than usual. My point is that you need to peek at the dough while it is kneading, even in an automatic bread maker, and possibly adjust the moisture content of the dough, depending on weather or ingredient factors.

Making it without a bread machine

For those who would like to try this bread entirely by hand, you can do it as you would any bread recipe. You mix the ingredients together (KitchenAid mixer?), knead for awhile until it is soft and elastic (by hand of you want to get a workout, or by using the dough hook in your KitchenAid mixer if you don’t), then shape and do the first rise (30-60 minutes, depending on how warm your kitchen is). Punch down, reshape and do the second rise, and then bake. The dough cycle on the bread machine simply does the mix, knead, first rise and punch down, so that’s the part you need to add to this recipe if you want to do it all by hand. My grandmother didn’t leave specific directions for all those steps (back in the day, I think, you were expected to just know!), but if you consult any basic bread recipe that has 2 rises, you can get the general idea as well.

Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: about 2 1/2 hours (including mixing, kneading, rising, baking in bread machine)
Diet type: Vegetarian
Number of servings (yield): 12
Culinary tradition: Italian
My rating 10 stars:  ★★★★★★★★★★ 

Tagged as: bread maker, butter, Easter, Easter bread, eggs, Kerrygold, TwelveLoaves, yeast

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