Italian Milanese Chocolate Bread Cake | Torta di Pane Milanese
Updated: 6 days ago
Milan has thrown away less bread than almost any other Italian city, and the reason is architectural. The michetta, the hollow five lobed roll that the city eats by the million, is mostly air. It is superb for about four hours and stone dry by the following morning, and that daily surplus of hard bread is what produced the torta di pane as a fixed part of the Milanese kitchen rather than an occasional act of thrift.
What separates the Milanese cake from every other Italian bread cake is the chocolate. Cocoa goes in, chopped dark chocolate goes in with it, and after Christmas the leftover panettone goes in as well. That sounds like a simple addition and it is not. Cocoa powder is mostly starch and fibre and it absorbs several times its own weight in liquid, so it competes directly with the bread crumb for the milk in the bowl. Put dry cocoa into a batter calibrated without it and the cake bakes short, dense and dusty.
The recipe below handles that competition instead of ignoring it, by hydrating the cocoa in hot milk taken from the total before it ever meets the bread, and by splitting the chocolate between powder and chopped bar so that some of it contributes fat rather than absorption. Everything else is the same frugal cake that has come out of Lombard kitchens for two centuries: dark, heavy, faintly bitter, cut in squares and eaten cold with the fingers.
Yield: 12 servings from one 9 inch (23 cm) round tin or an 8 by 11 inch (20 by 28 cm) rectangular one. Prep: 40 minutes. Soak: 2 hours. Bake: 55 to 65 minutes. Rest: 12 hours before cutting. Difficulty: easy. Course: dolce. Region: Lombardy, Milan and the Brianza.
The Story
The michetta arrived in Milan with the Austrians. It is a direct descendant of the Kaisersemmel, the imperial roll of Vienna, brought south during Habsburg rule in the eighteenth century and reshaped by Lombard bakers into something lighter and emptier than the original. The Milanese version rises into a five lobed star with a hollow centre and walls barely thicker than a fingernail, which makes it wonderful to fill and hopeless to keep. Under the humid summer air of the Po valley it goes leathery in hours and rock hard overnight. A city eating that roll daily generates a great deal of stale bread, and it built a cuisine around the consequence.
The cake made from it goes by several names within a short radius. In Milan proper it is simply torta di pane. In the Brianza hills north of the city it is michelasc, and in the countryside towards Lodi and Pavia it becomes torta paesana, baked for the fairs and eaten standing up. The Milanese version is the chocolate one. Cocoa reached Lombardy early through the Spanish court and was being drunk in Milan by the seventeenth century, long before it was cheap, and by the time cocoa powder became an ordinary grocery in the late nineteenth century it went straight into the cake that every household already made.
Panettone is the other Milanese contribution. From the twenty sixth of December onwards, every kitchen in the city holds half a panettone that nobody wants to eat plain any more, and it goes into this cake in place of some of the bread. It brings candied orange peel, sultanas and a great deal of butter with it, and Milanese cooks count on that, cutting back the added butter and the raisins when they use it. The cake was traditionally baked for the feast of San Giovanni in June and again in the days after Ferragosto, both moments when the ovens were already lit and the bread bin was full.
Ingredients
For the bread and milk
Stale michetta or other dry white bread, crusts included, 14 oz (400 g)
Leftover panettone may replace up to half the bread by weight
Whole milk, 3 1/3 cups (800 ml), divided
For the chocolate
Unsweetened cocoa powder, natural or Dutch process, 1/3 cup (40 g)
Dark chocolate, 70 percent, coarsely chopped, 4 1/4 oz (120 g)
For the batter
Granulated sugar, 3/4 cup (150 g)
Large eggs, 3
Unsalted butter, melted, 3 tbsp (40 g)
Amaretti biscuits, crushed, 2 3/4 oz (80 g)
Raisins or sultanas, 2 3/4 oz (80 g)
Grappa or dark rum, 3 tbsp (45 ml)
Pine nuts, 1 1/2 oz (40 g)
Finely grated zest of 1 unwaxed lemon
Baking powder, 1 tsp (4 g)
Fine sea salt, 1/2 tsp (3 g)
For the tin and the top
Unsalted butter for the tin, 1 tbsp (15 g)
Dry breadcrumbs for the tin, 2 tbsp (15 g)
Pine nuts for scattering, 2 tbsp (15 g)
Granulated sugar for the top, 1 tbsp (12 g)
Preparation
Steep the raisins
Put the raisins in a small bowl with the grappa and 2 tablespoons of warm water and leave them for the whole of the soaking time that follows. They should finish plump and heavy, with almost all the liquid taken up. Dry raisins added straight to the batter behave like small sponges in the oven and pull moisture out of the crumb around them, leaving a hard nugget in a dry pocket. Anything left in the bowl at the end goes into the batter with them, since it is now flavoured with fruit sugar and worth having.
Break the bread and cover it with milk
Tear the bread into pieces roughly the size of a walnut and put them in a large bowl. Warm 2 1/2 cups (600 ml) of the milk to about 105°F (40°C) and pour it over. Press the bread down under the surface with a plate, cover the bowl and leave it for 2 hours at room temperature. Reserve the remaining 3/4 cup plus 1 tbsp (200 ml) of milk for the cocoa. Unlike its lakeside cousins, this cake is never wrung out afterwards: all of that milk stays in the bowl, because the cocoa is about to want a large share of it.
Bloom the cocoa in hot milk
Heat the reserved 3/4 cup plus 1 tbsp (200 ml) of milk to about 175°F (80°C), just below a simmer, and whisk the cocoa into it a spoonful at a time until there is not a single lump left. Let it stand for 10 minutes. Two things happen in those minutes. The starch granules in the cocoa take up water and swell, so they will not steal it from the bread later, and the heat drives off the raw dusty note that dry cocoa carries into a batter. The mixture should look like a thin, glossy hot chocolate. Let it cool to lukewarm before it goes anywhere near the eggs.
Melt half the chocolate and chop the rest
Chop the dark chocolate and set half of it, about 2 oz (60 g), over a bowl of water held at a bare simmer until it is melted and reads around 115°F (46°C). Leave the other half in rough pieces the size of a small fingernail. The melted portion disperses through the batter and deepens the colour and the bitterness all the way through. The chopped portion stays as discrete pieces that soften into pockets during the bake, and those pockets keep the crumb immediately around them noticeably moister than the rest.
Mash the bread to a coarse texture
Work the soaked bread with your hands or a sturdy whisk until it breaks down into a thick, uneven mash. Stop while pieces the size of a pea are still visible throughout. A batter taken all the way to smoothness with a stick blender bakes into something closer to a dense pudding, and the whole character of a torta di pane comes from those surviving fragments of crumb, which stay slightly chewy and give the cut surface its mottled look.
Build the batter
Beat the sugar into the bread mash, then the eggs one at a time, then the melted butter, the lemon zest and the salt. Pour in the bloomed cocoa milk and the melted chocolate and mix until the colour is completely even and no paler streaks remain. Sift the baking powder over the surface and fold it through last. The batter should be thick enough to fall heavily from a spoon but still pourable. If it seems stiff, add whole milk 2 tablespoons at a time until it loosens, which is often needed when the bread was very dry to start with.
Fold in the amaretti, fruit and nuts
Fold in the crushed amaretti, the steeped raisins with their liquid, the chopped chocolate and the 1 1/2 oz (40 g) of pine nuts with a spatula, in about eight strokes. The amaretti bring bitter almond, which is the flavour that makes this cake taste Lombard rather than simply chocolate, and they also soak up a little of the free liquid and firm the batter as it stands. Do not crush them to dust: pieces the size of a lentil are right.
Prepare the tin and bake
Heat the oven to 340°F (170°C) with a rack in the lower third. Butter the tin heavily and dust it with dry breadcrumbs rather than flour, which is the traditional Milanese treatment and gives the crust a faint extra crunch. Pour in the batter, level the top and scatter the remaining pine nuts and the tablespoon of sugar over it. Bake for 55 to 65 minutes. The cake is ready when the top has set into a matte crust with fine cracks, the edges have pulled slightly from the tin, and a skewer pushed into the centre comes out with moist crumb clinging to it but no wet batter. An instant read thermometer should show about 195°F (90°C) in the middle.
Cool completely and rest overnight
Leave the cake in its tin on a rack until it is fully cold, which takes about three hours for a cake this dense. Then cover it and leave it at room temperature for at least 12 hours before cutting. This is not a suggestion. The cocoa continues to take up moisture from the crumb as the cake sits, and a torta di pane cut two hours out of the oven tastes wet and tastes of very little, while the same cake the next day is firm, sliceable and three times as chocolatey.
Plating
This cake is cut in squares, not wedges, even when it has been baked in a round tin, and that is how it looks right. Trim the outer half inch from a rectangular cake and cut the rest into pieces of about 2 1/2 inches (6 cm) on a side, wiping the blade every few cuts because the chocolate drags. A rectangular tin is genuinely the better choice for this reason, and the Brianza version is almost always baked that way.
Serve it cool or at room temperature, never warm. Around 64°F (18°C) is the point at which the chocolate has firmed enough to give a clean edge and the amaretti and lemon still come through. Straight from the refrigerator the cocoa flavour is muted and the crumb is claggy. Straight from a warm kitchen in August it is heavy.
Put out nothing on the plate beside it. A dusting of cocoa or powdered sugar over the top is the only decoration this cake has ever had, and even that is optional given the pine nuts and sugar already baked onto the surface. If you want something alongside for a restaurant service, unsweetened mascarpone loosened with a spoonful of milk is the one accompaniment that belongs to the same region and does not sweeten an already sweet plate.
Professional Technique
The governing technical fact in this cake is that cocoa powder is an absorbent, not a flavouring. What is left after the cocoa butter has been pressed out is roughly a fifth starch, another fifth insoluble fibre and about a fifth protein, and that combination takes up something in the order of three to four times its own weight in water. The 1/3 cup (40 g) in this recipe will therefore lock away 4 to 5 oz (120 to 150 g) of liquid on its own. Drop it in dry, at the end, into a batter that was worked out for a plain bread cake, and it takes that liquid from the only place available, which is the soaked crumb. The cake bakes noticeably shorter, cuts dusty and goes stale in a day.
Blooming the cocoa in 3/4 cup plus 1 tbsp (200 ml) of milk at about 175°F (80°C) solves this by feeding it first. Heat accelerates the swelling of the starch granules and fully disperses the fine particles, so by the time the mixture meets the bread it has already claimed its share of the liquid and reached equilibrium. There is a flavour benefit as well: warm hydration releases the aromatic compounds that stay locked in dry powder, which is why bloomed cocoa tastes rounder and less chalky. The bread keeps the 2 1/2 cups (600 ml) it was given and the balance of the batter is preserved.
Splitting the chocolate between powder and chopped bar is the second deliberate choice. Bar chocolate at 70 percent carries about 42 percent fat and almost no free starch, so it absorbs nothing and instead contributes fat that coats flour and bread proteins and shortens the crumb. Melting half of it disperses that fat evenly and darkens the whole cake, while leaving the other half in fingernail sized pieces creates local zones where cocoa butter melts into the surrounding crumb during the bake and then resets as the cake cools. Those zones are why a well made Milanese torta di pane is moist in a way that a cake coloured with cocoa alone never is, whatever the milk quantity.
Texture and Moisture Control
The target is a close, damp, faintly chewy crumb that holds a clean cut edge, somewhere between a very moist cake and a set pudding. There is almost no flour and no leavening structure worth speaking of, so the cake is held together by egg protein, by swollen starch from the bread and the cocoa, and by fat. That means the doneness window is judged by internal temperature rather than by a dry skewer: about 195°F (90°C) at the centre, which is where the eggs have fully coagulated. Baked to a genuinely clean skewer the cake will be past 205°F (96°C) and irretrievably dry.
Moisture keeps moving after the oven, which is why the overnight rest matters more here than in almost any other cake. Immediately out of the oven the free water is unevenly distributed, concentrated in the bread fragments and short in the cocoa rich matrix around them. Over the following twelve hours it equalises, the cocoa starch finishes gelatinising and setting, and the crumb firms from wet to dense. Keep the cake covered but not sealed during that rest, with a clean cloth or loose foil, since an airtight container traps condensation on the crust and softens the one crisp element the cake has.
Humidity in the kitchen changes the starting point more than most bakers expect. Bread left out in a damp August in Milan is leathery rather than dry and holds a great deal of residual water, so it takes up less milk and the batter comes out slack. Bread dried in a heated winter kitchen is brittle and will drink more than the recipe gives it. Judge by the batter and not by the measure: it should drop heavily from a spoon in a thick lump, not pour and not stand. Adjust with milk 2 tablespoons at a time, and only ever upwards.
Professional Mise en Place
Nothing about this cake is à la minute. It is made a day before it is needed and it improves in that time, which makes it one of the easiest desserts to hold in a service. The organisation is entirely about staging the soak and the rest so that the cutting happens on the right day.
Equipment and tools
Large mixing bowl and a plate that fits inside it to weigh the bread down
Small saucepan and a whisk for blooming the cocoa
Heatproof bowl for melting chocolate over water, and an instant read thermometer
Round 9 inch (23 cm) tin or a rectangular 8 by 11 inch (20 by 28 cm) tin, well buttered and crumbed
Long thin bladed knife and a jug of hot water for cutting the rested cake
Prepared ahead
Bread dried out deliberately, 2 to 4 days in advance, uncovered on a rack
Raisins steeped in grappa, up to 3 days ahead in a sealed jar in the refrigerator
Cake baked and rested a full day before it is needed, still in its tin
Amaretti crushed and pine nuts weighed out, the morning of the bake
Panettone, if you are using it, torn and left out overnight so it dries to the same state as the bread
Service setup
Cake cut into squares no more than an hour before service, kept under a cloth
Hot water and a cloth beside the board, since the chocolate pockets drag on a cold blade
Cocoa or powdered sugar in a fine mesh sieve for a last dusting over the cut squares
Mascarpone loosened with milk, cold, if an accompaniment is wanted
Plates at room temperature, and the squares held at about 64°F (18°C), never refrigerated before serving
Chef Tips
Dry the bread on purpose rather than waiting for it to happen. Tear it up and leave it uncovered on a rack for two to four days in a cool room, or give it 15 minutes at 250°F (120°C) with the oven door propped open if you are short of time. Bread that has gone hard in a closed bag is a different thing entirely, damp inside its own crust, and it makes a heavy gluey batter no matter what you do afterwards.
Use Dutch process cocoa if you want the deep near black colour that the best Milanese versions have. Alkalised cocoa is darker and much less acidic than natural cocoa, which suits this cake because there is no acid ingredient here for it to react with. Natural cocoa gives a redder, sharper, fruitier result that is entirely legitimate and simply tastes different. Either works with the teaspoon of baking powder.
When you use leftover panettone, drop the added butter to 2 tablespoons and cut the raisins in half. Panettone is already around 20 percent butter and carries its own sultanas and candied peel, and the cakes that come out greasy and oversweet are almost always the ones where a cook substituted panettone for bread without adjusting anything else. The lemon zest becomes more important in that version, not less.
Bake it in a rectangular tin if the cake is for a crowd. It cuts into more even portions, the corners give you the chewy edges that are the best part of it, and it bakes a few minutes faster because the depth is shallower. Start checking at 50 minutes in a rectangular tin, and always trust the thermometer over the clock with a batter this wet.
Common Mistakes
Adding the cocoa dry to the batter. It pulls 4 to 5 oz (120 to 150 g) of liquid straight out of the soaked crumb and bakes a dusty, short, quick staling cake. Whisk it into hot milk taken from the total instead, and let it stand ten minutes before it joins anything else.
Blending the bread to a smooth purée. The mottled crumb with visible bread fragments is the whole identity of a torta di pane, and a stick blender destroys it in seconds, leaving something closer to a baked chocolate custard. Mash it by hand and stop while pea sized pieces are still there.
Baking until the skewer comes out clean. With this little flour, a clean skewer means the centre has gone past 205°F (96°C) and the eggs have squeezed their water out. Look for moist crumb clinging to the skewer and about 195°F (90°C) at the middle.
Cutting it the same day. The cocoa has not finished taking up moisture and the cake tastes wet and flat, which is the most common reason people conclude the recipe is bad. Twelve hours at room temperature transforms it, and twenty four is better still.
Using bread that went stale in a bag. It is hard on the outside and damp within, so it never absorbs the milk evenly and leaves gluey patches through the baked cake. Dry the bread openly on a rack, or in a low oven with the door ajar.
Substituting panettone without adjusting. It brings its own butter, sugar, sultanas and peel, and a straight swap gives a greasy cake that is too sweet to eat in any quantity. Halve the raisins and cut the added butter to 2 tablespoons when you use it.
Sealing the cake in an airtight box to rest. Condensation collects on the crust and softens the sugared pine nut top, which is the only crisp contrast the cake has. Cover it with a cloth or loose foil so it can breathe while it settles.
Wine Pairing
Sangue di Giuda dell'Oltrepò Pavese DOC: The Lombard bottle that belongs on the same table as this cake, made from Croatina and Barbera in the hills south of Pavia and left gently sweet and lightly frothy. Its bubble lifts a crumb that is dense and heavy on the palate, and its blackberry fruit meets the chopped dark chocolate without either one having to give ground. Alcohol stays modest, which matters after a long lunch.
Moscato di Scanzo DOCG: Italy's smallest DOCG, grown on a single hill outside Bergamo from a red Moscato dried on racks before pressing. It smells of rose, dried plum and sage, and that herbal edge is what makes it work here, cutting across the sweetness of the amaretti rather than reinforcing it. There is real structure behind the sugar, enough to follow a cake that is this concentrated.
Sforzato di Valtellina DOCG: The interesting choice, and a dry one. Nebbiolo dried for three months in the Alpine valleys of northern Lombardy, it finishes without residual sugar yet tastes of dried fig, tobacco and cocoa, so it reads as sweet alongside the cake while actually scrubbing the fat away. Its firm tannin needs the chocolate to soften it, which is exactly what it gets here.
Vin Santo del Chianti Classico DOC: Tuscan rather than Lombard, but it answers the amaretti more directly than anything from the north. Long oxidative ageing in small barrels leaves it tasting of toasted almond, dried apricot and caramel, and that almond note runs straight alongside the crushed biscuits in the batter. Pour it cool and in small quantity, since it is far sweeter than the cake itself.
Recioto di Soave DOCG: A white made from dried Garganega, with a honeyed, almost waxy weight and a fine thread of acidity underneath that a sweet red cannot supply. That acidity is its argument here: it resets the palate between squares of a cake that coats the mouth with cocoa and fat. Its candied citrus character also picks up the lemon zest in the batter.
Storage & Reheating
Kept whole at room temperature under a cloth or loosely wrapped in foil, the cake holds for 4 days and is arguably at its best on the second and third. It needs no refrigeration and is worse for it: cold hardens the cocoa butter and flattens the aroma, and the crumb takes on the dry firmness that the overnight rest was meant to prevent. If your kitchen is above 77°F (25°C) or genuinely humid, then refrigerate it in a sealed container for up to 6 days and bring each square back to about 64°F (18°C) for an hour before serving.
Once it is cut, press a piece of parchment or foil against the exposed faces before covering the cake, or store the squares in a single layer with parchment between them and the lid. Left open, the cut surfaces dry into a crust within half a day, and unlike the top crust that one is not pleasant. Never store it alongside anything strongly aromatic, since the high fat content picks up outside smells quickly.
It freezes very well, which is not true of most bread based desserts. Cut it into squares first, wrap each one in film and then in foil, and hold them at 0°F (minus 18°C) for up to 3 months. Thaw at room temperature for about 2 hours, still wrapped, so the condensation forms on the wrapping rather than on the cake. A square that has been frozen benefits from 6 to 8 minutes in a 300°F (150°C) oven, uncovered, which dries the surface and re melts the chocolate pockets. That is the only circumstance in which this cake should ever be warmed, and it must be allowed to cool again before eating.
Nutrition
Per serving, based on 12 squares from one full tin:
Calories: 360 kcal
Total Fat: 16 g
Saturated Fat: 7 g
Trans Fat: 0.2 g
Unsaturated Fat: 8 g
Cholesterol: 60 mg
Sodium: 210 mg
Total Carbohydrates: 47 g
Fiber: 3 g
Total Sugars: 27 g
Added Sugars: 19 g
Protein: 8 g
Lactose: 3.2 g
Principal micronutrients: iron, magnesium, potassium, calcium, phosphorus, zinc, copper, vitamin B2
These figures are estimates. Sodium comes almost entirely from the bread and varies by several hundred milligrams depending on how heavily the loaf was salted, and using panettone in place of half the bread raises the fat and the sugar by roughly a quarter each.
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