Ciabatta Bread

 I've been itching to make something over the last week, so I decided to make Anna Olson's ciabatta bread recipe yesterday, which can be found at http://www.foodnetwork.ca/recipes/recipe.html?dishid=10906. I've never made ciabatta bread before, but the process of making it is similar to Laura Calder's boule recipe, so I figured I was up to the challenge. The biggest difference was that I had to make a starter, also called biga, which I had never heard of doing before.

In truth, although I began the recipe yesterday, most of it was done today. All I could do yesterday was make the starter, as it had to sit in the fridge for at least 12 hours. Upon taking the starter out of the fridge (which consists of yeast, water, and flour), I noticed that it was full of bubbles. From what I understand, the starter is meant to add to the flavour of the bread, as a fermentation process takes place while the starter mixture sits in the fridge. Only a cup of the starter was required for the dough, so I decided to double the bread dough so that I could make full use of the starter. This recipe gives you enough starter for two cups. 

The next step after allowing the starter to ferment was to mix the actual bread dough. This bread dough begins with a mixing of milk and yeast. Then you add the olive oil, water, and one cup of the starter mixture to the dough. Once that's all combined, the flour and salt get added. The recipe uses a stand mixer, but I don't have one, so I mixed the flour and salt into the mixture with a spoon, and then kneaded the dough by hand until it felt stretchy and elastic. Then the dough went into a bowl greased with olive oil, was covered with plastic, and left to rise for 90 minutes.

Once the dough had risen, I took it out of the bowl to shape. The recipe instructions suggest rolling the dough into a cylinder shape and then stretching the dough in to a rectangle that measures 20 inches by 8 inches. Then you have to cut the dough in to two rectangles that the recipe says will measure 10 inches by 4 inches. I was actually confused by the recipe, and for a moment thought I had to cut the dough in to 4 pieces, as you can't get a 10 inch by 4 inch loaf by slicing a 20 inch by 8 inch piece of dough once; you can if you slice it twice. I watched the video on the foodnetwork website, though, and realized that there must have been a typo in the recipe. I just cut it once and aimed for roughly 10 inches by 4 inches (for pieces that were too large, I folded the dough a bit to get it smaller). When the dough was shaped, I had to cover it with a towel and leave it to rise for another 90 minutes. The recipe does suggest putting cornmeal on the baking pans, but I chose not to do this step.

The loaves had to bake at 425F for about 20-25 minutes, but first I had to heat the cookie sheets in the oven while it preheated. Once the oven was preheated, I placed the loaves on the pans and put them in the oven. One interesting step of Anna Olsen's recipe, however, is that she suggests spraying water into the oven to help get a good crust on the bread. I didn't have a spray bottle, so instead I placed baking dishes of water into the oven to create steam; I had read about that on another website, although I can't remember where.

Sure enough, the ciabatta loaves  came out of the oven golden brown, and they smelled heavenly! We decided to have some slices of bread with dinner. I noticed that the bread isn't as holey as I think ciabatta usually is, and it has a softer texture, but the crust is crispy and the bread is really delicious. Maybe it was just my execution of the recipe that made it slightly different than what I usually think of as ciabatta, but it was encouraging to see the ciabatta loaves come out of the oven looking the way they're supposed to.