The Accidental Ciabatta

In my continuing bread hobby, I decided to make a straight up white bread sourdough, which I've yet to make. I've been using a few different books as my guides and one of them is the Culinary Institute of America's massive textbook, Baking and Pastry. This is not your standard cookbook, since it is designed to be used in commercial applications. Bread recipes in this book make 10-20 lbs of dough, for an equal number of loaves. When I use this book, as I did in this case, I have to do some calculating to figure out the correct proportions. In this case, I must have made an error in my reductions since I ended up with a very wet and sticky dough.

Now, some doughs should be wet and sticky, but your standard sourdough isn't one of them. I realized it pretty late in the game--very late, in fact. I'm still trying to figure out what the texture is for the various doughs: firm, soft, semi-firm, tacky, slack--all are terms you see in recipes, but it seems to me that they are pretty subjective. I guess I just need to learn by doing.

Regardless, what I was left with was a very soft, sticky and slack dough, very reminiscent of the ciabatta dough we worked with in California. There was no way that this bread would hold it's shape in the oven, if it had been proofed in a bowl. I decided at that moment to treat the dough as if it was ciabatta. What you do with ciabatta is to place it on a canvas sheet that is heavily floured. (In my case, a kitchen towel). This is traditionally called a couche (pronounced "coosh"). You scrunch up the canvas to create a wall on either side of the roughly shaped ciabatta. This provides some semblance of structure so that the dough doesn't simply pancake all over your canvas sheet. Cover it with some plastic, and then let it proof for about a half hour.

The bread turned out well after all that anyway. I guess I'm learning that bread is pretty forgiving, though I'm not certain how consistent I can be. This was excellent bread, just not what I planned on in the beginning. However, I think I'm going to keep the calculations that I ended up with. It acted just like a ciabatta, and baked up like a ciabatta loaf should, with large, airy holes throughout. I should have baked it for about ten minutes longer, but that's easily fixed next time around. Bottom line, it just might be my ciabatta recipe, since I think it's a keeper--accident notwithstanding.