It’s not the tallest, but that’s not the most important part.

Time: 8 hours 5 minutes + Overnight

Ingredient Availability: 5/5

Difficulty: 2/5

If you’re not familiar with ciabatta, it’s a bread with an incredibly airy interior and crisp exterior (when fresh). I’d been wanting to make some bread for a few weeks and this one looked interesting to me. I’ve already made regular white bread, brioche, and focaccia, so I thought I’d give this Ciabatta from King Arthur’s Baker’s Companion a try.

Key Ingredients and Omissions:

The only special ingredient in this recipe was the nonfat milk powder. I thought I might have a hard time finding it, but I actually had a few options to choose from at my local grocery store. Everything else is fairly common and easy to come by.

Tools:

• Stand Mixer

• Bowls

• Parchment paper

• Water Sprayer

Cooking Review:

Biga: 5 minutes + 18 hours 30 minutes overnight

To make the biga, which is essentially he starter for this bread, I just combined the water, yeast, flour, and some sugar in a bowl. Once mixed sufficiently, I covered it with a towel and set it out to do its thing overnight.

Make Dough: 26 minutes

I pinched off pieces of the biga and put them in the bowl of the stand mixer. Then, I added the rest of the ingredients and mixed using the paddle attachment until well combined for 3 minutes. I switched to the dough hook and kneaded the dough for 10 minutes.

Rise and fold: 3 hours 14 minutes

I transferred the dough to a lightly oiled bowl. Every 45 minutes, I slide my hands under the dough and folded it back onto itself, which also deflates it. One thing I want to point out is that the dough is very sticky, so if you do this with clean, dry hands, a decent a mount will be stuck to your hands after each fold. The recipe doesn’t have any tips on how to mitigate this, but you can do so by either wetting your hands or oiling them up. I ended up folding the dough a total of 3 times.

Form and Rise 2: 2 hours 14 minutes

I transferred the dough to an oiled work surface and split it in two. I formed the balls of dough into rough logs and transferred them to parchment lined baking sheets. From there, I patted them out into more rectangular shapes. Finally, I dimpled the dough with my fingers and covered them with oiled plastic wrap. You should oil or wet your fingers to prevent too much sticking when dimpling the dough. I let the dough rise for 2 hours.

Baking: 30 minutes

About 30 minutes before the dough finished rising, I started preheating the oven. Right before I put the dough into the oven, I sprayed some water into the oven. I carefully the plastic wrap and put the baking sheets into the oven. In the first 10 minutes, I sprayed water into the oven 3 more times, about every 3 minutes. I also rotated and swapped the baking sheets about halfway though the bake. I removed them from the oven when they were brown and registered 210 degrees Fahrenheit internally.

Cooling: 1 Hour 30 minutes

I turned off the oven, removed the loaves from the baking sheets and returned them to the oven to cool with the door ajar until completely cool. I finished by dusting them with some flour.

Analysis:

The first thing you will notice is how incredibly crispy and crunchy the crust is followed by soft and airy the interior is. Overall, the dough is very light with a decent flavor. It isn’t as flavorful as I would expect for such a long fermentation of the biga, but I think this bread is probably best paired with some olive oil or some other toppings. The next day, the bread was stale, as expected. I put it in the oven on 300 degrees for a few minutes, which crisped it back up. I added some olive oil and tried it with some mascarpone, whipped cream cheese, and peach jam. All of those combinations were great. I’m going to give this recipe a 7/10. It takes a lot of time, but not much effort. The result is definitely enjoyable, but nothing too special. Plus, as with nearly every home made bread, the dough is only at its peak for a few hours. If you like trying new breads at home, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.