ciabatta

ciabatta
The Italian Cookery Course, Katie Caldesi

I was inspired to try ciabatta from Katie Caldesi's The Italian Cookery Course. As she says, ciabatta is literally translated as 'slipper bread' and originates from Como.

I had some dough ready to bake a few weeks ago and when I discovered my oven was broken (arrghhh!), I put the dough into a plastic box, placed the lid on and put it in the fridge. For three weeks.

I took out the dough today and thought I would have a go at incorporating it into ciabatta which requires a 'starter', mother dough or biga. A 'starter' is also used in sourdough. It's called a starter because it is used in place of yeast, which starts the fermenting process necessary to make the dough rise. It is just flour and water left to ferment using the natural yeasts in the air. This fermentation process also gives the finished bread product a lovely yeasty flavour, which is not present in commercially produced bread.

Here is my dough (starter in the background newly 'fed' with flour and water) ready for proving.

Here is the dough after an hour and a half. Look at the bubbles in that starter!

and all the bubbles in the ciabatta dough:

The dough was put onto a floured surface, made into a rectangle and then cut into four. This was very difficult. The dough was so wet that it just poured out of the basin.

I had no choice but to leave the four mounds of dough on the bench to prove for another 1.5 hours.

These were 'placed' (read scraped off the bench and plopped) onto two pre-heated baking sheets and put into a very hot 220 deg C oven for approx 20 mins.

Here are two:

I think the oven was too hot. Anyway, the cut open top loaf looked like this:

There are issues here.
1. over-cooked on the top
2. holes are not uniform throughout the loaf
3. some areas are quite dense

Flavour-wise, though, it was good. It was chewy, as it should be and the nice sour notes from the biga came through, so that was good.

I'll try this again soon, as the family sort of devoured the rest of the ciabatta, especially after I added chopped garlic and parsley and olive oil and cooked it in the oven. It was delicioso.