Coca de Sant Joan: the most popular recipe to kick off the summer that is just beginning

BarcelonaThe first Baluard bread oven, Anna Bellsolà inaugurated it in 2007. He named it Baluard because it's located on this street in the Barceloneta neighborhood, across from the market. Today, there are twelve bakeries, distributed throughout all the neighborhoods of Barcelona, where the breads and pastries that have made them so popular from the very beginning are delivered. Today, we'll explain how to make the San Juan cake they make every year at home.

Ingredients for a 1,200-gram dough (one 750 g and the other 350 g)

To make the bun

• 600 g of medium-strength flour (tending towards high)
• 190 g butter
• 120 g of sugar
• 3 eggs
• 110 g of water
• 40 g of yeast
• 12 ml of anise
• 20 ml of orange flavoring
• 12 g salt
• A splash of extra virgin olive oil

For decoration

• A beaten egg and some milk
• Candied fruit: orange, cherry, melon
• Pine nuts of the country
• Sugar

Elaboration

1. To make the bun, take a bowl and knead the ingredients. Start with the liquid ingredients: the egg, anise, and orange flavoring.
2. We will set aside the water to mix the yeast, which the bun contains in large quantities.
3. Using a spatula, we mix the yeast with the water and add it to the bowl with the other ingredients.
4. Next, add the sugar. Mix well until the sugar has dissolved completely into the liquid.
5. Once dissolved, add salt to the flour and add it to the bowl with the combined liquids. Do this little by little. Mix well with a spatula.
6. There are many recipes for making buns, some adding milk instead of water, but the traditional Baluarte recipe uses water.
7. And now it's time to start working the dough with your hands.
8. Remove it from the bowl, place it on the kitchen counter, and fold it over itself. It's a long process; it takes thirty minutes to achieve a smooth, integrated dough.
9. Let it rest for fifteen minutes, covered with the same bowl.
10. After this time, add the butter, which should have come to room temperature. Roll out the dough a little and spread the butter on the top layer.
11. To continue, fold the dough, turn it, and knead it for another 30 minutes until it has absorbed the butter, making it more comfortable to work with.
12. When you see that it no longer sticks to the table and that the dough is elastic, you'll have it.
13. A trick to check if the dough is cooked properly is to take a piece and stretch it. If it's as smooth as a sheet without tearing, the dough is done. If it tears, let it rest for another two minutes.
14. After two minutes, let it rest again in the bowl, with a little extra virgin olive oil, and covered with plastic wrap. You should refrigerate it for eight hours.
15. After eight hours, you'll notice that the dough has moved, but it's not as swollen; the cold has prevented this.
16. We take it out of the bowl, and now we divide the dough according to the weight we want each cake to have.
17. We suggest making two: a medium one, weighing 750 grams, and a small one, weighing 350 grams. Check their weight with a scale.
18. Shape them into balls and let them rest again because they are cold from the refrigerator and need to lose the coldness to stretch them.
19. Let it rest on a tray lined with baking paper, with a drizzle of olive oil on it.
20. After 40 minutes, we'll now roll out both doughs. Roll them out on the counter with your hands until they form an oval shape. Lightly oil the counter to prevent them from sticking. You can roll them out with a rolling pin. They should be about one centimeter thick.
21. Let the cakes rest again for forty minutes. This can be done at room temperature (40 minutes) or in the oven at 25-30 degrees Celsius for twenty minutes. This fermentation should double the dough's volume.
22. After this time, brush the dough with a mixture of egg and milk; this step will help us adhere the fruit.
23. Top with candied fruit, which you can buy well-prepared: candied orange, melon, cherries, local pine nuts, and sugar. Finally, the sugar.
24. Now you can place the cakes in the oven, preheated to 170 degrees, for about 25 minutes. With a fan-assisted oven, you can use the fan-assisted setting, with top and bottom heat. If you have a steam setting, you can also use it for a few seconds to give them a little more shine and volume.
25. After 25 minutes, you can remove them from the oven. Let them cool before cutting and tasting them. And that's it.

Four tips for a summer night

To follow the ritual of the beginning of summer, and with the permission of the writer William Shakespeare, from whom we have taken half the title of one of his comedies (A Midsummer Night's Dream), We explain how you can enjoy your coca de Sant Joan to the fullest.

• If the Sant Joan cake you make (or buy) has cream in it, the best advice is to eat it the same day.
• If not, store it in the refrigerator and consume it within eight hours, always making sure the cold chain has not been broken.
• If you like candied fruit, you should keep in mind that you can buy it prepared to your liking at bakeries. Interestingly, melon is originally a melon, not a pumpkin, as is sometimes claimed. It's a melon, but dyed with dark green food coloring.
• If the San Juan cake doesn't have any cream and you have some leftover, you won't need to refrigerate it. Plus, you can eat it the next day after toasting it a bit in the toaster or oven.

Enjoy!