Ciabatta

 

This bread was really interesting to make b/c it was my first hearth bread. This means that a hearth was recreated within the oven in order to bake the bread similar to what it would be baked inside of a hearth oven or a wood-brick oven. The purpose of hearth baking is to promote oven spring and a crisp crust. This process involves setting the temperature of the oven to 500 degrees and setting an empty steam pan on a rack above where the bread will be. Once the bread is placed inside of the oven, you should pour a cup of boiling water in the steam pan and close the oven immediately. After this, you begin misting the sides of the oven in order to create more steam and vapor. In thirty- second intervals, you continue steaming the sides of the oven for 2 minutes.

Besides the difficult steam process, this bread had to be shaped in a new way using the stretch and fold method. This bread is well-known for its big holes and amorphous shape. These characteristics are due to the stretch and fold method. This method is done once and then the bread proofs and is shaped once more. This creates the holes and crevices that are well-known to ciabatta bread.

Peter Reinhart offered a few different varieties of these recipe – toppings to add like cheese or mushrooms, carmelized onion and herbs – I chose to use cheese of course b/c you can’t go wrong lol. I used sharp cheddar and gouda.

First of all, this bread requires a poolish preferment – providing more flavor and more fermentation

 

shaping the loaves

Second, the shaping process is pretty much like folding a letter – you stretch the dough as far as possible and then proceed to fold from the left over and the from the right over.

 

right before the oven

 

the pretty loaves

 

they are a little funny shaped haha

 

I thought that the bread turned out very well, considering a lot of new challenges and processes that I had never done before.

 

Oh and in case you were wondering…my bread def. had some big holes. I was pretty excited.