Ciabatta

The recipe I found for portobello mushroom burgers called for ciabatta bread rolls. I found this nice easy recipe and thought I'd make my own.

The ingredients are the usual ones for bread, strong bread flour, water, yeast and a bit of sugar and salt. There is more water than usual and it does make a really wet dough. The kneading technique is completely different.

Ingredients:
500g High grade flour (strong flour) (I used white strong bread flour)
450 ml Luke warm (room temperature)
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 ½ teaspoon dry Yeast
1 ½ teaspoon salt
Olive Oil

Method:

1. In a large bowl mix with your hands flour, sugar and yeast.Pour in the water.

2. Add salt and ‘beat’ in the bowl with your hands for 5 minutes. The dough should be like a very thick pancake paste not like a regular bread dough. To beat the dough you need to pull at parts of the dough and stretch it up high and then slap it down again. This pushes air pockets into the dough to create the airy texture. If you have a food mixer, beat it with a dough hook but still finish off with the hand method to push air pockets into the dough.

3. Pour about 1 tablespoon of olive oil over the dough so the oil covers the top and goes down the side of the dough.

4. Allow to rise covered with plastic wrap for about 1 hour or until it doubles in size. Pre heat oven to 200C.

5. Pour the dough onto a well floured work surface (without kneading any further) and fold over like an envelope length ways to create the ciabatta shape.

6. Lift dough onto a floured baking tray and bake for 30-40 minutes, until golden and when tapped sounds hollow.

I found the recipe really easy to follow. I decided to combine steps 5 and 6 and just poured the dough onto the baking sheet before trying to fold it. It was really wet and so this was quite hard to do. The end result was a delicious, light bread. I will definitely be making this again.