Ciabatta

With our new panini press, I thought a nice Italian bread would work so I tried the Ciabatta from The Bread Bible. Ciabatta is a very wet dough and as the paddle was whirring in my stand mixer I wondered if this gloopy thin dough would turn into bread. The dough is supposed to triple within 2 hours and it took me almost 3 for mine to triple. My place is cold and I thought a mug full of boiling water would help. I’m sure it would have taken 6 hours if I didn’t have the hot water.

I used wet hands to work with the dough so the it wouldn’t cling to me. Inverting it was a bit tricky as it’s a very soft dough but I managed to throw it down on my Silpat. You’re supposed to push the sides together so it’s at a width of 4.5 inches. I’d try to push it into place and then later during the rising it would spread. I think it’s probably from working with wet hands and a slick surface. I think it might hold it’s shape if it was on a different surface. When I went to check to see if it was done, there was a nice shatter of crust when I stuck my digital thermometer in.

Mine came out 1/2 an inch flatter as it’d spread when I tried to push the sides of the dough up. Through some Googling it seems this ciabatta is big favourite of many people. It’s got a nice crispy and chewy crust and the crumb is very light. We’ve eaten about half of this bread already! In the book it says unbleached all-purpose flour is better than bread flour because of the lower protein content. Canadian unbleached all-purpose flour is supposed to perform like bread flour, so I’d like to try this again with bleached flour and see what the difference is.

Recipe here.