Tag Archives: yeast

March 5, 2015 · 5:19 pm

Types of yeast for baking

3 x yeast

From the left: fresh yeast, active dry yeast, instant yeast

One of the awkward things about writing recipes for baked goods leavened with yeast is that there are three different types of yeast available commercially. Each has a slightly different quality, each is used in a slightly different way, and there are several different names to boot. It can make for some convoluted recipe ingredient lists.

I wrote more here about the specific species of yeast that we use for foods and our relationship with them, but here I want to look at the types of commercial yeast and how you use them.

Leaving aside sourdough / natural leavens / wild yeasts, the three yeast products in question are: fresh, active dry yeast and instant yeast.

Fresh yeast

Fresh yeast

Also known as cake yeast, compressed yeast and, in Italian, lievito di birra fresca (fresh beer yeast), fresh yeast is my preferred form. It is strangely both squidgy and crumbly.

In large scale bakeries, they may use 200g, 500g or 1kg blocks of the stuff, but for the home baker you may find it in 25g, 42g or 50g cubes or in the US I believe it comes in 2 ounce (57g) packs. Italian supermarkets stocked it, but most British ones don’t. I’ve heard that you can ask in in-store bakeries, but as these places are generally not actually bakeries – they mostly buy in pre-made dough and bake it off, rather than making it from scratch on-site – I doubt this. I get mine from a health food shop that sells it in 30g and 60g bags. You can buy it mail order easily enough (eg from Bakery Bits in the UK).

Using fresh yeast,  typically you activate it in your liquid – water, or perhaps milk if you’re doing an enriched dough. If the liquid is tepid, the yeast will form a froth after a short while. I prefer to use mine like this as I feel it makes it easier to distribute it into the flour, but Breton-born, Britain-based baker Richard Bertinet, for example, simply rubs it in as you would to add fat to flour. I’ve done this, and it works fine.

Fresh yeast is best stored in the fridge and will only last a few weeks, max. Then it’ll darken and go sludgy and not do you any favours.

Active dried yeast

Active dry yeast

ADY was the baking yeast I grew up with – small granules that sat in the fridge door in a jar or orange tin. It doesn’t need to be stored in the fridge, but arguably that way it’ll last for months, possibly even years, as it’s pretty much inert, the live component encased within the shell of the granules.

You do need to activate ADY to use it – again by adding it the liquid component of your recipe, and letting it froth up. Adding some sugar or honey to the liquid encourages this, as it gives the yeast some immediately accessible carbohydrates to start feeding on before it gets access to the carbohydrates in the flour.

Powdered yeast

Instant yeast

Also known as easy-blend, easy-bake yeast, fast action or quick, this is another type that can, confusingly, also be referred to simply as dry or dried yeast.

It’s similar to ADY but is finer, almost powdery. I don’t tend to use this, it’s just not something I learned to bake using, or have a particular affinity for, but it’s probably the most commonplace type of yeast available these days.

You can buy it in packs, such as these 125g ones from Dove’s Farm, but most typically you’ll find it in sachets of 7g (1/4 oz), which is about 1 1/2 teaspoons and is considered a convenient amount – you’ll often find recipes with 400g flour and 1 sachet, but recipes that rush the fermentation and proving times may do, for example, 500g and 2 sachets.

The big difference when using instant yeast is that you don’t need to activate it or mix it with the liquid first – you add it directly to the flour.

Compared to fresh yeast – which is essentially a product consisting of exactly the same commercially cultivated microorganisms – instant yeast will contain additives. Nothing too scary – just ascorbic acid and sorbitane monostearate (E491), an emulsifier. Though personally I would rather use a product that’s been industrially messed around with less, even if it’s just a little bit.*

Converting between types of yeast

As with all these things, if you look around online no one is quite in agreement about how to convert quantities of the different types of yeast, but a good rule of thumb is to use half the weight of fresh if converting to ADY, and a third of the weight of fresh if converting to instant.

So for example, a recipe that calls for 20g fresh yeast you could replace that with 10g ADy or 7g instant yeast. Or as percentages where fresh yeast is 100%, ADY is 50% and instant is 33%.

Of course, as you learn more about baking you’ll learn more about these variables – so for example, if you do a longer fermentation, you may be able to reduce the amount of yeast in a recipe and just leave the yeast to keep working. If you want a quick loaf (which I don’t recommend, because long fermentation = more digestible = less issues with wheat), a recipe may call for a much higher proportion of yeast.

My basic recipe made with commercial yeast works with these quantities:

1000g flour (100%)
350g water (70%)
20g fresh yeast (2%) or 10g ADY (1%)
20g fine salt (2%)

Addendum

If you’re interested in food history – as I am – Dorothy Hartley’s round-up for yeast types from her 1954 book Food in England is an noteworthy comparison. She lists five types of yeast:
Brewer’s Yeast – made by “the brewer’s wife; and sold to the farmer’s wife at market, to which it was carried in earthenware jars.” This is what we’d call barm, and something I’ve experimented with thanks to a supply from my brewer friend Michele.
Dry yeast – for storage or use aboard ships, “made by spreading the yeast out on a wide board, and more on top, over and over, as it dired, till it was a couple of inches thick.” It was then cut into pieces and stored, then reactivated in warm water as we commonly do with fresh yeast.
Potato yeast – potato boiled “and pounded up with some treacle and their own boiled water” with a little yeast added. So not really a type of yeast in itself, more of a medium. Although if left, such a mixture will develop its own wild yeast culture – this is the technique used for Maori rewena bread.
German yeast – imported from Hamburg then later Holland. “It was introduced in about 1850, and by 1866 we imported 5,735 tons in a year.”
Modern yeast – “obtained from a grocer will have a fresh clean smell, and be cool and firm.” She describes breaking it up and activating it in sweetened water, so it actually sounds like fresh yeast.

Possibly creating confusion, in The Last Food of England (2007), Marwood Yeatman says “Compressed yeast, known to the Victorians as ‘German’ or ‘dried’, and which we call ‘fresh’, is descended from brewer’s yeast.”

 

 

 

 

* All these yeasts are industrially cultivated of course, fed sugars and pushed through a series of tanks, vats and fermenters, sealed to prevent any contamination from wild yeasts. But it’s a matter of degrees and where you prefer to draw your line as the number of additives in our foods increases, even in tiny incremenents. I strongly believe the ever-increasing industrial processing and additives in our food are responsible for so many health and dietary issues and disorders.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, maybe one person in school (say 1%) had a food allergy or intolerance, now every second person has one.

Take wheat – a lot of people have difficulties with it today, or believe they do, hence the proliferation of gluten-free products (many of them hideously industrially processed) and gluten-free baking blogs and books. I ardently believe, however, that for most people (not all) the problem is more likely to be with the industrial “food” product and the ingredients, not with the grain itself. Human civilisation was largely built on wheat, at least in the Middle East and Europe.

If you eat a sandwich made of white sliced “bread” you may well feel bloated and sick; if you eat a sandwich made with real bread – made from just wheat, water,  salt and yeast (better yet, sourdough) and fermented for at least five hours, preferably more – you may not have the same reaction. I stopped  eating sliced industrial “bread” because it made me feel ill. This is what got me more interested in making real – really digestible, really nutritious – bread.

Humanity developed the skill of converting wheat into a nutritous foodstuff by giving it a long fermentation: a form of processing. And not packing the bread with additives. Sliced industrial “bread” may only be fermented for 20 minutes and is packed with additives. Is it any wonder modern “food” is making people ill when we so readily reject knowledge garnered and honed over millennia in favour of hubristic chemistry experiments?

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March 21, 2014 · 1:00 pm

Our friend yeast

Unproved bread dough

Proved bread dough

It doesn’t matter how many times I make bread, I always find the rising, the leavening, of dough enormously pleasing. The quiet industry of yeast is nothing short of a wonder, and our relationship with it remarkable.

Yeast is a microscopic type of fungus. Of course, “yeast” in the baking and brewing senses refers to a variety of different species of yeast. Predominantly, however, bakers’ yeast is a strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The main yeast used in brewing is also a strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. It’s also a key player in winemaking.

Some etymology
Myco is the Greek for fungus (with mycology the discipline of studying fungus). Saccharo, like saccharine, is also from the Greek, for sugar. So Saccharomyces means sugar-fungus.

Cerevisiae is generally translated as meaning “of beer”, but to go a little deeper, it’s presumably related to Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain, agriculture, and fertility, and the origin of our word “cereal”. (Ceres is also the name of a yucky strong Danish lager much loved by undiscerning Italians, but we won’t go into that.)

Cerevisia / cervisia means “beer” in Latin, and is the origin of the Spanish cerveza and even the obscure Italian word cervogia. Indeed, struggling through an Italian etymological dictionary, the vis is the Latin for “force” or “strength”, so the Latin name for beer seems to literally mean “the drink containing the strength of cereal”.

This is one of those many occasions when I wished I’d studied Latin. I went to a flippin’ Catholic school for crying out loud, but we didn’t do Latin!

Anyway, for most of humanity’s long history of bread-making and brewing, we were oblivious not just to the specific strains of yeast, but even to the whole concept of microorganisms. And yet there they were, helping us access the nutritional qualities of grain through the millennia. Yeast was first observed in 1680, but not recognised as a living thing. Louis Pasteur identified yeast as the cause of alcoholic fermentation in 1857 and the cause of dough inflating a few years later.

Even today, there’s plenty of disagreement about certain aspects of the nature of yeast: according to various figures, in a single gram of yeast, for baking or brewing, there are between 8 and 20 billion cells.

Oh, and after all that Latin and Greek, the word yeast itself is from the Old English gist/gyst, with very similar words in other northern European languages and, it seems, a Sanskrit root – yásati, meaning “(to) boil” or “to bubble”

Fungus fun for all the family
So thanks yeast. Or yeasts, as it’s not just S. cerevisiae. Other Saccharomyces are used in the production of food and drink, such as S. pastorianus (the hybrid strain used for bottom-fermenting lagers and pilsners; formerly known as S. carlsbergensis), S. bayanus and S. uvarum.

Then there’s the whole Brettanomyces genus. This name means “British yeast” and was so-named during investigations into English ales at the Danish Carlsberg brewery in the early 20th century. B. bruxellensis is an essential element in the production of Belgian Lambics and related sour beers.

Then there are other genera like Kazachstania, with K. exigua, found in sourdough cultures and olive brine. Heck, even the Candida genus comes into play. Yes, C. humilis, a yeast from the genus responsible for a lot of fungal infection, and even wine spoilage, is considered the “dominant species” for the production of some sourdoughs.

I like dogs, but with their invaluable services in the production of staple food and drink, to leavening bread doughs and fermenting alcohols, perhaps these yeasts have a better claim to being man’s* best friend(s).

* Sorry, inherently sexist language. Can’t really sidestep this by putting mankind’s or humanity’s either.

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July 29, 2013 · 1:21 pm

Bread malfunction!

In my last post about bread-making, I mentioned that the previous two loaves I’d made had started out seeming fine but after a few days they went bad. The crumb, which had previously been firm and at that sweet-spot between dry and moist, started to collapse, becoming dense and damp in the centre. It wasn’t a problem I’d had before so I started wondering what was causing it: under-proving,  over-baking, some dodgy flour?

Or the heat.

Surely it was something to do with the heat? Although I baked with decent results last summer, when July and August similiarly peaked at around 40C  (100-plus in ye olde Fahrenheit), this year my bread seems to be suffering.

Even the nice durum wheat-strong bread flour loaf I baked last Thursday. Although it was great on Thursday and Friday, by Saturday morning, when we headed out of town for a night, it was suffering from the same problems. We got back last night, and the crust that was left was in a very sorry state.

So this is how it looked after it had cooled on the day of bake:

CU

And this is how it looked after three and a half days.

bread gone wrong

Sure it was a few days old, and getting stale (particularly around the edges, near the crust), but the core has gone all damp and dank, fizzy and yeasty. Not pleasant.

This yeastiness got me thinking: has it started fermenting again? The yeasts used in the dough were killed by the oven of course – the bread was baked at around 230C, and yeasts die at around 60C.  So are there wild yeasts in my bread bin for example? I mooted this question with my friend Michele. He’s not a baker, though he is a master brewer (at Mastri Birrai Umbri, whose wares we were enjoying Saturday night), so he knows his yeasts.

2013-07-27 20.29.52

He asked if I had fruit near where I stored the bread. Yes, I said, there’s a fruit bowl near the bread bin. It’s a great time of the year for seasonal fruit here in Roma – the region is cranking out apricots, plums, peaches, Coscia pears, figs, etc etc etc. Even someone like me who doesn’t much like fruit is enjoying this bounty.

But maybe it’s messing up my bread. Fruit, even when rinsed, has abundant wild yeast cultures on its skin.  Just think of advice you might have read about starting a natural leaven/sourdough: use some grapes, or raisins, or a some rhubarb (not strictly fruit, but close enough). These wild yeasts will be thriving at the moment, as the weather is humid and hot, as Rome heads for high summer. Even now, without the oven cranking at 240C, the kitchen is 30C. A pretty nice temperature for yeasts, moulds and bacteria.

So maybe the wild yeasts are finding my bread and starting to feed on it.  Which might indicate that I’ve not proved long enough, not leaving the yeast I’ve used in the bake long enough to cosume all the natural sugars in the flour. I’m not sure.

Fellow bakers – any thoughts?

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January 4, 2013 · 3:19 pm

The natural leaven, or sourdough starter

What is a leaven?
A leaven is simply the agent that causes a bread or other baked item to rise. It can be a chemical agent like baking powder, or it can be a type of yeast, which is encouraged to fart out carbon dioxide to fill your dough with pockets of gas – the holes in the crumb.

The yeasts (products, not species) most commonly used in bread-making are the powdered, instant or easy-blend yeast; the granular active dried yeast (ADY) aka dried active yeast; and fresh yeast, compressed bakers’ yeast, which is known as lievito di birra (beer yeast) here in Italy, a reminder of the relationship between baking and brewing. On this blog, however, I also talk a lot about natural leavens, which I often just refer to as leavens.

Healthy leaven

Yeast, bacteria and a long, strange symbiosis
A natural leaven is also known as sourdough, or lievito naturale or madre (mother) here in Italy (where it’s generally a much lower hydration), or a levain (if you prefer to use a French term to sound extra sophisticated).

The natural leaven is a culture containing both yeast and bacteria strains. So while bakers’ yeast is the strain Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a natural leaven will contain a colony of various strains of wild yeasts and lactobacilli. The latter is a remarkable genus of bacteria that humanity has had a relationship with for millennia. Lactobacilli play a part in the production of many fundamental consumable delights, such as beer, wine, cheese, yogurt, cocoa and, of course, bread.

It’s a fascinating symbiotic relationship, and one I enjoyed exploring while living on a smallholding in New Zealand years ago, making some crazy cheeses. And who’d have thunk chocolate involved fermentation? Well, it does: the pulp and seeds of the harvested cocoa pods are fermented before drying. Gotta love Theobroma cacao – that is “Cocoa: food of the gods” in Greek.

Anyway, I digress. (As usual.)

When humanity first started making leavened bread, it was thanks to lactobacilli and wild yeasts. In a bread natural leaven, the lactobacilli and yeasts live alongside one another in a sludgy slurry of flour and water, the starter. This was the chief way of making leavened bread from around 1500BC (or earlier) until the Middle Ages, when bakers starting using beer barm, the froth on the fermenting brew.

In the 19th century, when the likes of Louis Pasteur were not only overhauling our understanding of disease but also revolutionising the production of fermented foods, Saccharomyces cerevisiae was finally identified and became, effectively, a crop: brewers’ yeast.

When you mix yeasts with flour, the sugars in the cereal grains (notably maltose) provide them with food. The result of this feeding is lactic and other acids; the by-product is the carbon dioxide. These acids are what can give sourdoughs a pronounced, even tart flavour. Rye flour gives an especially sharp flavoured bread, but some wheat-based sourdoughs can be as mild as breads made with bakers’ yeast.

Healthy leaven

How to create a leaven culture
The easiest way to start a leaven may well be to buy a good book, like Dan Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf. This gives a great account of how it’s done with plenty of lovely pics. Or you could read on, for a somewhat less professional lesson.

If you’re using a good quality flour, one where the character of the grain hasn’t been brutalised too much by industrial processing, it may well contain have suitable wild yeast strains already. The yeasts are also on and in your body, and even in the atmosphere. Some people collect them by leaving a jar of flour and water outside but if you live in a polluted city you might want to control the process a little more carefully.

You can do this by putting a handful of raisins and a few teaspoons of live yogurt in a mixture of equal proportions of water and flour. Another baker here recommends rhubard. While Sandor Ellix Katz says “organic plums, grapes, or berries.”1 The fruit will (hopefully) have just the right yeasts on their skin, the yogurt will introduce the lactobacilli. Put the jar, covered with a cloth or with the lid on loosely, in a warm place.

Over the following few days, feed more flour and water to the leaven, stirring it well. To keep things at a reasonable domestic scale, I tend to feed mine around 20g each of flour and water, morning and night. Equal proportions of water and flour mean you have a “100 per cent hydration” leaven2. Lepard suggests increasing the proportion of flour slightly to slow down the fermentation.

It should start to bubble – not like a fizzy drink of course, but you’ll see gas in the sludge and perhaps some foaminess. The smell will become slightly alcoholic too. If your leaven is nice and active and bubbly, it’s happy – so strain out the raisins, their work is done. You can now use some for baking. (Instead of straining out the raisins at this point, you can just soak them overnight at the start and use the liquid. Watch the video here on Viva La Foccacia. It’s in Italian, but even if you don’t understand, the process is clear.)

If you just keep feeding the leaven, without removing any to use, it can become unhealthy, with too much ethanol (another yeast by-product) in the mix. If this happens, simply take a small amount, and, in a fresh jar, start feeding it again.

Feeding the leaven

Your pet slurry
When you have a natural leaven, you have to think of it almost like a pet: it’s a living thing that needs care, needs feeding. But that doesn’t mean it’s hard to maintain. If I’m not baking much, or not making sourdoughs, I leave my jar of the leaven in the fridge for weeks, even months occasionally. This retards the fermentation process, as the culture prefers a temperature of 25-35C, not the 4C or so of a fridge.

After a while, the leaven will divide into a grey, putty-like goop, with a watery liquid on top. It’s not dead though, just a bit unhappy. To revive it, you can take a spoonful of the goop, put it in a clean jar and start feeding it again, as described above.

If you change the flour, the yeast strains may well change, and your bread may well taste different, but to me that’s all part of the fun. My leaven is about four years old now, had moved house three times and even moved from Britain to Italy. During this time, it’s been fed on white wheat flour, wholewheat flour, durum wheat flour, emmer flour, spelt flour and rye flour.

For a while I had two parallel cultures, one white wheat, one rye, but it didn’t really seem necessary. If you plan ahead, you can simply take some leaven and feed it with a different flour, creating another strain. This may take around a week of regular feeding.

Be nice to your pet slurry and it could last you a lifetime. Or several lifetimes. There are stories of prospectors in the American gold rush who carried their sourdoughs, which may well have originated in Europe, across North America. I can well believe this as, years ago, I knew an Austrian guy in New Zealand who’d transported his culture around the world in the form of dried flakes, which he rehydrated when he wanted to bake. (He was basically smuggling. Introducing food, vegetable matter and organisms to the Antipodes is a serious no-no these days as they have major problems with foreign species. Don’t do it kids!)

Anyway, some of the US immigrant natural leaven cultures may well still be used today in the thriving sourdough bakery scene of the West Coast US. Certainly some cultures still in use date to the mid-19th century. Gotta love that symbiosis.

Footnotes
1 Katz is a respected US fermentation expert. Something of a guru in fact, who treats his HIV with fermented foods. His book Wild Fermentation includes a recipe for Basic Sourdough Starter (page 95), which says this about the inclusion of fruit: “One effective technique for speeding up the introduction of wild yeasts into your sourdough is to drop a little unwashed whole fruit into it. Often on grapes, plums, and berries you can actually see the chalky film of the yeast (‘the bloom’) that is drawn to their sweetness. These and other fruits with edible skins… are great for getting sourdoughs bubbling. Use organic fruit for this. Who knows what antimicrobial compounds could lurk on the skins of the fruits of chemical agriculture?”

2 Bakers’ percentages are based on the amount of liquid (usually, but not always, water) as a proportion, a percentate of the flour in the recipe. There’s more info here. Leaven percentages are considered in the same way as dough percentages.

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November 23, 2012 · 9:03 am

Pane di San Martino

In the autumn of 2011, I noticed bags of a yellow-ish powder on a stall in the farmers’ market in the Ex-Mattatoio in Testaccio, Rome. It was farina di castagna – chestnut flour. That is, flour made from the dried and milled nuts of Castanea sativa, the sweet chestnut tree.

At the time, I experimented with it. A friend commented that there is in fact a traditional Italian bread made with chestnut flour, called pane di San Martino, or St Martin’s bread. The feast day of St Martin is 11 November, just around the time the year’s chestnut flour becomes available.

Anyway, I mentioned this bread to a teacher who I was doing a (food-focussed) conversation class with. She dug out a recipe. Well, she clearly Googled a recipe, as a quick Google myself soon found her source, which is here (in Italian).

After having gone through all that, I then completely failed to try the recipe. A year went by, autumn returned – and so too did the chestnuts, and chestnut flour. So last week I bought a new pack, and determined to revisit the pane di San Martino recipe.

Firstly, however, I had to translate it.

It talked in vague terms: “Prendere mezzo mestolo di farina di castagne e mezzo mestolo di farina di frumento…”, that is “Take half a ladle of chestnut flour and half a ladle of wheat flour…” But which ladle? I’m not a fan of the cup measure in recipes – especially as a US and an Australian cup, say, are different sizes. But what about an Italian ladle? I had two in my kitchen, one medium-small, one medium-large. Was either suitable? I plumped for using the medium-large one, and weighing the flours in grams. (If you’re interesting in scaling up recipes, using grams and kilos makes things a lot easier, in part as the maths are more manageable when you’re working with percentages and a measures based around factors of ten. Ounces smounces.)

Anyway, I translated and converted the recipe, but it still wasn’t quite right in terms of the liquid/dry quantities, so I also revised it while making the dough. Indeed, all flours have different absorbency, so you will have to have a feel for dough when you’re adding mixing the water and flours. This time, I used an organic, stoneground farro bianco – white spelt – flour from the renowned Marino Mulino. If you use a wholewheat flour it will require a more water than a white flour.

So. Pane di San Martino. My teacher gave me some notes that said this bread is found from Emilia-Romagna in north Italy to Salento, in Puglia, the heel. I’ve never seen it in Rome though. In fact, I’ll come clean and say I’ve never seen it anywhere, in the crumby flesh. So although my version is based on an Italian recipe, my version has no claim to authenticity. Which might upset an Italian baker, but shouldn’t be a problem if you stumble upon this recipe from other climes.

The recipe uses both a leaven (sourdough culture) and fresh yeast. This is a technique used by one of my favourite bakers, Dan Lepard, though it might upset some purists. OK, purists, that’s two warnings now.

Make a sponge with:
50g chestnut flour
50g of wheat or spelt flour
12g fresh yeast
50g wheat or spelt leaven/sourdough culture (100% hydration – that is, made with 50% water, 50% flour)
180g tepid water

Cover and leave to ferment for around two hours.

Make a dough with:
The pre-ferment
350g wheat or spelt flour
250g chestnut flour
300g water. Add more if the dough feels too tight.
20g olive oil
12g salt

Combine with a spoon or spatula. You want a moist dough. Don’t be afraid to add more water. When it’s a good consistency, knead to combine.

Cover and leave to rest for 10 minutes.

Add:
180g walnuts and knead gently to combine.

Cover and leave to rest for 10 minutes.

As the original recipe didn’t involve first and second proving periods, nor does this version. (I think I may work on this recipe though, and adjust the proving. Watch this space.)

Weigh the dough and divide in two. Form two balls, then leave these to prove in baskets or bowls lined with flour clothes.

Leave to rest for around two hours in a warm place away from draughts. Timing will vary depending on the temperature of where your prove the dough.

Preheat the oven to 220C.

Line a baking sheet with parchment. (I’m not using a stone at the moment, just a fierce domestic gas oven.)

When the dough feels springy and alive, almost jelly-like, you’re ready to bake.
Gently upturn the proving baskets/bowls onto the baking sheet.
Make cuts in the top – you can make slashes how you feel, as long as you use a sharp blade and don’t drag at the dough. (Slashes in a loaf used to be the owner’s signature when people used communal village bread ovens.)

Bake for 20 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 200C and bake for a further 20 minutes.

You want the loaf to have a nice colour, and sound hollow when you knock on the bottom. (This isn’t an exact science either but if it sounds hollow, that’s some indication the dough isn’t still soggy and doughy inside, instead it’s baked and dry.)

Leave to cool on a wire rack.

The resulting bread is sweet, almost cake-like, and pleasant for breakfast or afternoon tea, and makes good toast when it’s aged past its initial softness.

Addedum
The great travel writer Eric Newby had a strong connection to Italy – he hid in the Italian mountains during WWII, as described in his wonderful Love and War in the Apennines, and he and his wife – who he met during the war – returned there many times, eventually buying a house in the mountains in 1967. It was called I Castagni, “The Chestnuts”; on the theme of said foodstuff, in A Small Place in Italy he writes “This room extended the whole height of the building and had originally been constructed for the purpose of drying chestnuts. They were laid out and dried over a fire that had a chimney which extended up to the height of the roof. When they were dry they were ground up into a pale, brownish flour and used to make a rather sickly, sweetish sort of bread called castagnaccia which, until long after the last war, was a staple food in many parts of mountain Italy.”

Later on, he writes more about the importance of chestnut trees for “the principle necessities of life”, from building materials to food, specifically castagnaccia, “what had been a stabple food that most old contadini [peasants] now wanted to forget they had ever eaten, because of the memories it brought back of long years of poverty.” Interestingly, the suffix -accio / -accia often indicates a perjorative, so castagnaccia could be translated – very loosely – as “yucky chestnut bread”.

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