Ciabatta

I am pretty sure that at some point I have eaten ciabatta, but I am also pretty sure that it was used for a sandwich and I had never really looked too hard at a loaf. That being said, I decided that ciabatta would be the best option for a little picnic with pesto pasta.

First off, the picnic got rained out by thunderstorms and I am afraid that might have been foreshadowing for my bread. What King Arthur’s All-Purpose Baker’s Companion describes a homely, started out as a normal seeming dough starter called a Biga. Biga is different than my sourdough starter. It is doughier and seems as though it could be used to make a small pizza, if I wasn’t planning to leave it sitting out overnight.

The next morning, I pulled the biga out. I should have put it in a different container. Silly me, apparently in my Friday night sleepiness, I put it in a 2 cup container when a 3 or 4 cup was more appropriate. The lid was sitting on top of the biga which had risen a half inch out of the container. I shrugged it off though. Bread can be finnicky, but hopefully that did not cause any failings.

The dough is super difficult to deal with and I cannot imagine kneading it by hand. This recipe did not even give you an option for that, though.

Due to the rather sticky nature of the dough, I did struggle with the shaping. One of the two loaves ended up being a bit flatter and wider. The other a bit more on par with the suggested dimensions. The rise seemed to go well. It was a pretty warm southern spring morning so the temperature was prime for rising.

The result has been a little underwhelming. Although the King Arthur folks did warn me the the loaves tend to look “like a homely, comfortably broken-in slipper,” I was nervous that the bread had not risen correctly and had failed outright.

The bread turned out to be delicious. There are no two ways around that. It worked wonderfully with the pesto pasta we had and I made delicious sandwiches with the leftovers.