Newbie member here looking for some assistance!
I've just tried the full Panettone recipe in Modernist Bread - and had a disaster which I've never experienced before and still trying to work out why.
I've made the Panettone in Bread Bakers Apprentice loads of times and while it isn't as light and airy as I would like, it's a good flavour - so I thought I'd gave the full MB version a go to see how the texture (and taste) varied with the full multi stage build and levain only recipe.
All was going well until I started to mix the final dough - once I started to add the egg yolks then it looked like the gluten network started to break down. I kept going in the hope that things would 'come right' again - but no - over the course of a couple of minutes the dough went from a medium gluten development to something that felt like a thin paste with no gluten development apparent. It felt more like a thin cake batter than any dough I've ever worked with. I went on and added the butter and let it mix for a while longer on a low setting but it didn't change the texture or start to develop any structure.
I've been looking to see what could cause this but I'm stumped. I've made the mistake before with brioche dough of adding the butter before the gluten network was properly developed (and ended up with something that felt more like cake than brioche), but in this case I hadn't even started adding the butter before the dough started breaking down and it browk down very quickly. It hadn't even been mixing for very long - and it was only only setting 1 on the KitchenAid so I can't believe it had been overworked.
I'd love to know what I can do to avoid this happening again - and to understand what would cause a dough to break down like this.