Making Ciabatta

I'd been staring eagerly at my stand mixer for weeks, and I decided it was time to make a real loaf of bread. Quick bread recipes are great, but I longed for the taste of a real yeast-leavened bread.

I've always had a thing for sourdough bread, especially for the hard crusted Italian version, ciabatta. I wanted to create the kind of bread you wait eagerly for, mouths salivating, when you sit down at Luigi's for dinner. Connoisseurs will immediately understand. Good ciabatta has a chewy, hard outer crust that protects a soft, slightly sour inner sponge.

Doing a quick search for ciabatta, I came across this recipe. It looked rather difficult, but I knew that there was no quick way to make a real loaf of homemade bread. Growing up, my family had a bread machine. We'd use it to make strangely squared loaves of bread that were excellent for sandwiches and general snacking. But in this instance, I wanted to do it the old fashioned way and produce a "real" loaf of bread. It's the same kind of impulse that gives me a sense of guilt when I grill burgers over propane instead of lump charcoal.

Ok, so I did cheat and use modern mechanized mixing and kneading technology. You see, unlike Auntie Sophia, I don't have arms like a rounded Italian farm wife. My appendages are more akin to a T-Rex's - short and relatively useless.

After making the starter, I prepared the rest of the recipe in my stand mixer. I should note that I measured the flour by weight and not by volume. It is downright impossible to accurately measure flour by volume (I've found that a "cup" of flour weighs 135 grams), and I don't know why the world hasn't completely switched over. I mean, all of you have electric scales to measure your food, don't you? The dough turned out very runny and very sticky. I was a bit worried, but these fears turned out to be unfounded.

My oven and baking stone were heated thoroughly to the near NASA-hot 425 degrees, and I plumped my loaves on their parchment mats onto the stove. I took the added step of spraying the inside of the stove with water every few minutes to keep the humidity up, but I think next time I'll just sit a baking dish full of water under the stone.

In a short 30 minutes (longer than the recipe, but I was opening the oven regularly), I was rewarded with 2 beautiful loaves of bread. 1/4 of a loaf is about 3.5 points.

Each loaf turned out perfect. The hint of olive oil played merrily against the subtle sourness of the starter and milk. The bread was soft, but a little chewy with a happily firm crust. Just do yourself a favor and use a sharp, high quality bread knife with a sawing (not chopping) motion. That way you won't crush the airy interior while trying to hack away at the outside.

Was it an efficient use of time? HECK NO. It took me hours to make enough bread to feed my family for 10 minutes. But as with so many things in life we do them because we have to. If we don't, then the old ways will fade away, never to be eaten again.