Sourdough Ciabatta with Caramelized Onions & Herbs / adapted from Poolish Ciabatta // Peter Reinhart, The Bread Maker's Apprentice

I'd like to focus on ciabatta for a while. I have yet to achieve the "airy" quality deriving from big interior holes in this bread, and no doubt my handling of the dough is partly responsible. Luckily it's tasty even if not correct.

This bread was an adaptation of Peter Reinhart's poolish-method ciabatta, using my sourdough starter. I fed the starter and increased the hydration to something like a poolish consistency, and then I simply replaced the poolish quantity with the starter and omitted the commercial yeast. My starter had been fed with both a rye blend and bread flours from King Arthur.

All of the commentators on ciabatta agree: this dough has to be wet, as wet as you can make it. I used milk and water and gave it a go in the stand mixer, then took it through several stretch-and-folds on a bed of flour. I picked up the trick from another cookbook of doing this stage in a casserole dish (it holds the wet dough and the bed of flour pretty well). I gather from some breadmaking sources that you actually want to use a softer flour for ciabatta, but I have yet to test this out.

I also used the option in The Bread Maker's Apprentice of caramelizing some onions and adding some herbs (tarragon), which are all added to the dough during stretch-and-fold operations. The final rise is on floured cloth. The bread (which was definitely puffy -- perhaps it deflated in the transfer to the oven?) is baked on parchment, on a hot stone.

Seeded Pain au Levain // The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion

Just ordinary pain au levain, rolled in an aromatic seed mix from King Arthur Flour.

Multigrain Extraordinare // Peter Reinhart, The Bread Maker's Apprentice

This recipe calls for a grain starter containing oatmeal, cornmeal, buckwheat. It also takes some cooked rice. In this picture you can see the center swirl that comes from rolling the loaf up out of a flattened rectangle. Cooked in a bread pan. It's a sweeter bread with some brown sugar.

Crackerbreads // The King Arthur Flour Book

Lately I've taken a break from yeasted breads and tried the techniques of stone-baked flat breads. The following are "Many-Seeded Crackerbread" and "Carta di Musica," respectively.

 

The upper picture is of a crackerbread that's meant to have a lot of seeds in it -- I used the King Arthur bagel topping, which includes bits of onion.

The lower picture is of a crackerbread that's brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with rosemary after it's removed from the oven.

The fun thing about the Carta di Musica is that it contains semolina flour and can, after resting, be rolled out and handled/stretched like a thin crust pizza:

Both breads are baked on a hot stone. Here's the seeded bread:

On Deformed Baguettes

The authorities all say that shaping a good baguette (or even a demi-baguette) takes practice. Indeed, Maggie Glezer even suggests that the professionals can get rusty without practice. I usually content myself with whatever lumpy shape makes it onto the stone, but lately I've made a couple of more conscientious attempts at baguette. The following are the (revealing) results: breads that look like they've exploded out the side, or grown goiters.

The reason for the goiter, of course, is a failure to seal the bottom edge of the bread adequately. The shaping of loaves is supposed to create a taut, smooth surface or "skin" that can help to seal the bread. In shaping a baguette, the baker takes the bread through at least two letter-fold sequences (see Peter Reinhart, The Bread Maker's Apprentice, for pictures).

I've struggled with the sealing-the-edge technique, described as sealing the bread with the heel or the edge of your hand. My dough often seems reluctant to seal, whether due to overworking (should I let it rest, then come back and pinch it again?) or to picked-up flour from the board.

In the meantime, humorous results (this one was more of a batard anyway).