day 16: ciabatta

I had a great run today!! I did intervals for 32 minutes (1 min @ 6.7 mph / 30 sec @ 9.5 mph) which got me about 4 miles. Then I jogged to round out my 40 minute cardio session. I felt great afterwards! I was really pumped because I’ve been dragging my feet lately in my runs. I could attribute my success it to my training, but instead I’m going to attribute it to my lunch: a homemade lox with ricotta cheese, avocado, arugula, and sundried tomatoes sandwiched between two slices of this beauty:

That’s Homemade Ciabatta, Baby!

(Okay, so my run probably had little to do with my bread… I just wanted to show it off)

I bought a brand new baking book and I was so excited to use it! I absolutely love baking bread. I find it can be really challenging to get the bread to come out just the way you want it. But on the plus side, everyone loves homemade bread, even when it doesn’t turn out 100% perfect.

I was inspired by the Bread Baker’s Apprentice (BBA) Challenge at Pinch My Salt which is, quite simply, to bake every bread recipe in Peter Reinhart’s book The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. I know that I’m supposed to be cutting back on my refined carbs (and this book is full of refined carb recipes) but I just can’t resist baking. I need to knead! Haha!

I decided to start from the beginning with the first bread that I had all the ingredients for: Ciabatta. Flour? check.  Salt? check. Water? check. Yeast? check. I was ready.

Yesterday was a perfect day for breadmaking. I worked from home because of all the snowfall last night so I was stuck around the house all day anyway. I was so excited when I took these “slipper” loaves out of the oven. The looked perfect! When I cut into one, it wasn’t exactly as I had hoped. There were supposed to be BIG air pockets. There weren’t. The bread still tasted good, and the crust was perfect but I was a bit disappointed by the crumb.

Here are some pictures of the process:

The dough was created with a poolish that I made the night before. The poolish is a wet pre-ferment dough made of yeast, flour, and water.

Here is the dough after it had been stretched out, prior to the first rise:

And here is the final product. Notice how the air pockets in the bread are few and far between? That’s NOT what I was going for. Oh well, I’ll just have to try again: