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Paul Hollywood's Ciabatta Technical

Hello again! Sorry for the late update. I baked the ciabatta for this technical a week ago, but had a migraine all week. Since I am only now getting to post, I am going to give you two posts today.

This week, I purchased a cake decorating set. Considering how poor I am at decoration, I need all the supplies I can get. It came with a rotating cake stand, various frosting application knives and scrapers, a wire cake cutter, a bunch of piping tips, some reusable piping bags, silicone cupcake liners, a silicone candy mold (unfortunately heart-shaped), and more. I am very excited to have it, and look forward to using it to its optimal capacity.


On to the ciabatta... My challenge last Sunday was to make Paul Hollywood's ciabatta recipe from the technical challenge of Series 5 Episode 3. I did not follow the recipe precisely, but the bread turned out pretty well. It was a little flatter than I would have liked (although I don't really know how fluffed ciabatta should be), but it tasted great.

It is necessary to use a stand mixer for this bread. The dough is very wet and very sticky, and therefore prone to sticking to hands. I can imagine half of the dough would be lost from stickiness if I tried to knead it by hand.

The dough was so wet, in fact, that I chose to add an extra half cup of flour. The recipe says that the dough should be wet, and explicitly warns against adding extra flour. I, however, found the dough following the recipe was more like a thin cake batter in consistency. Perhaps my scale is inaccurate? I did not see any evidence of gluten activation until I added the extra flour.

I let the stand mixer knead the dough for about 10 minutes before I left it covered to rise for about an hour and a half. I do not own a 3 qt. square lidded container, so I admit I made do with my handy mixing bowl and a plastic bag to cover it. I then tipped it out and carefully split it into four and formed rectangular loaves. I let the loaves rise again for about 30 minutes. I then baked for 25 minutes at 425°F (220°C).

Why do I think the ciabatta came out flatter than I would like? I think that I could have left it to prove longer both before and after shaping. I also think I might have shaped the dough poorly; I likely should have made thinner rectangular loaves. I do not know whether they would have turned out better if I had not added more flour, but I am skeptical that I would have been able to work with and shape the dough without it.

The ciabatta loaves tasted delicious and had a nice airy texture. The would work very nicely for a panini. Vincent and I made tuna melts, and found the filling was a bit too pedestrian for the bread.





Recipe

Paul Hollywood's ciabatta recipe can be found here.

Later today, I will update you with my adventures in eclair making for Series 5 Episode 7's showstopper challenge.
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