Special edition: The best Easter bread recipe – step by step guidelines

Hello, everyone!

Easter is coming and probably you are looking for the best recipe of Easter bread. Of course you can find many different recipes in the internet, but you are not sure about a result. My step by step guidelines will help you to understand consistence of the dough and see the result at every stage. I didn’t create this recipe, but found the best recipe for me that comes from the west Ukraine.

This Easter bread taste so good that I cannot stop using this recipe (even though it looks a bit ugly), but you definitely should try it and you will fall in love with the taste as my family and I did it. By practicing it every year, I found some tricks that can help you, and which I will share with you in this post.

Remember, it is better to start making Easter bread in the morning, because it will take 8-10 hours in total (where from 40 minutes to 3 hours is just waiting time while dough will rest).

Ingredients

For the bread starter (pre-ferment):

1. Fresh yeast – 100 g
2. Milk – ½ of glass or 125 ml
3. Sugar – 1 table spoon
4. Flour – 5 table spoons

For the dough:

In this recipe you will use 8 egg yolks, so what to do with 8 egg whites? You can use one to make a zephyr, and what to do with the rest will be explained in the end of this post (read it before separating egg into egg yolk and egg white).

1. Bread starter that prepared before
2. Milk – ½ of glass or 125 ml
3. Flour – 500 g
4. Egg yolks – 8 pcs
5. Heavy cream – ½ of glass or 125 ml
6. Butter – 250 g
7. Vegetable oil (olive oil, any seed oil) – 2 table spoons
8. Raisins – 150 g
9. Cognac (brandy or vodka) – 1 table spoon
10. Vanillin – 1 tea spoon
11. Caster sugar (regular sugar) – 300 g

 

Stage 1. Prepare bread starter

Easter bread is a very special bread, and it takes almost the whole day to make it. But believe me, it tastes so good that it worth all the time you spent.

First of all, we will start with making a bread starter. For this, take ½ glass of milk and warm it a bit in the microwave (ca. 40 sec.). It should be a bit warmer than room temperature ∼ like 35-45 ºC. Then put 100 g of fresh yeast in the bowl, add milk  and 1 tbs of sugar to it. Mix it until yeast dissolves in the milk like on the picture below.

 

Now we need to add 5 table spoons of flour and mix it together. It will take ca. 3-5 minutes, and consistence of the starter should look like on the picture. When it’s ready, cover bowl with plastic film and put it in the warm place for 40-50 minutes to rise. It is very important to find a place with no air ventilation. I use my oven for this purpose (earlier preheated to 50 ºC).

 

While we wait until bread starter doubles in size, you can take a butter from the fridge and let it stay in the room temperature for 40 minutes.

40 minutes later…

Your bread starter should double in size. But if it hasn’t happened, no worries! Just add 1 table spoon of flour to the starter, cover it again and wait another 40 minutes following the same rules as before.

Any results that you have, will allow us having a very tasty Easter bread anyway, and that’s why I love this recipe so much. My bread starter looks like picture below.

 

The next stage is preparing a dough for Easter bread. In the list of ingredients, there is a lemon zest that you can prepare now and weight all ingredients accordingly  (leave your bread starter in the oven until we need it in the dough.

Stage 2. Preparing Easter bread dough

Take ½ glass of milk and boil it. But the best way is to stay and watch milk because amount of milk is so little that it will take a few minutes, and you don’t want to burn milk on the bottom of a casserole. Move the milk to a bowl for making a dough (use a food processor, or some spoon because milk is hot) and add 250 g of flour. Mix them together.

 

After you mixed hot milk and flour together, take ½ glass of heavy cream (125 ml) and warm it up a bit in the microwave (like milk). Add warm heavy cream to the mix of flour and milk.

 

After flour, milk and heavy cream are mixed together, we will add our bread starter and 8 egg yolks, and mix it all together.

 

The next step is to add butter (that one that stayed at least 40 minutes at the room temperature), 2 table spoons of vegetable oil, and 1 tea spoon of vanillin. Mix it all again.

 

Mix it all together until butter will be dissolved, and then add rest of the flour (250 g) and mix it all together. Then add raisins and lemon zest to the dough and keep steering it.

 

If you use food processor for mixing ingredients, then don’t stop it and add 1 table spoon of cognac (brandy or vodka) and 300 g of sugar. Continue mixing it until you will get consistence as on the picture below. Move it to the bowl where it can stay for 3 hour for resting and cover the bowl with plastic film.

 

Leave it stay for 3 hours in a warm place in the same way as with bread starter.

So, 3 hours later…

Take the dough from the oven (or your secret place), and it should looks like this. It has increased in size, but not so much as bread starter. The more it increases, the better it is.

Now, take forms in which you want to bake our Easter bread. I took three, but if you have forms similar to my, you will need just 2 (used these forms for the first time for Easter bread). Spray forms with some fat and then cover them with flour like on the picture below. You can do it with one form at a time, but for me it is easier to prepare more and wash not used one later.

 

Now take your dough with hands, it will be very soft and sticky, and fill in 2⁄3 of a form –  like on the picture below.

 

Let it stay in the warm place for another 60 minutes. See you in 60 minutes…

60 minutes later

Baking Easter bread

Our Easter bread dough has rested, and now we can start baking.

 

 

Warm up oven to 200 ºC (at least 10 minutes). When it is ready, lower temperature to 180 ºC.  Bake one Easter bread at a time, I will start with small one first. Bake it for 40 minutes at 180 ºC, and then lower the temperature to 165 ºC and bake it 5 minutes more.

Before taking it out of the oven, put a match in the bread and take it out. If the match is dry and clean, bread is ready. If the match is in the dough, put your bread to bake more. Every time when you think it is ready, check it with a match.

Let it stay in the form 10 minutes and the take it out. Let it cool down. Hint: Maybe it looks not like perfect Easter bread, but the taste is so amazing – you will want just more and more.

 The bigger Easter bread, I baked in the oven for 1 hour and 30 minutes and with a temperature 165 ºC. Before taking it out of the oven, put a match in the bread and take it out. If the match is dry and clean, bread is ready. If the match is dirty, put your bread to bake more. Every time when you think it is ready, check it with a match. When bread is ready, let it stay for 15 minutes in the form, and then take it out. Let it cool down.

Happy Easter, everyone!!!

Enjoy your Easter bread!

Hint: What to do with egg whites that are left?

When I separate egg for egg yolk and egg white, I put every egg white in a separate bag for freezer, or 4 egg whites together because later I can use them for macarons. Those packed each one separately, I use to make a delicious zephyr (take egg white from the freezer and put it in the fridge for the night before you want to use it, and on the next day you can use it).

See you next time!

P.S. If you have any question, suggestion or comments, please leave them under this post.