Looks like it’s time to get back to multi-day recipes again! Ciabatta has long been a favorite of mine — it’s tender and floury and makes a solid canvas for all sorts of dipping, topping, and filling combos. Reinhart gives several suggestions for flavoring the dough, I decided to make one plain ciabatta and one mushroom ciabatta. I like this recipe so much that I’m included an abbreviated version of Peter Reinhart’s original recipe — for more notes and variations, I absolutely recommend checking out his books!

The Process

Ciabatta dough is quite loose and wet compared to many bread doughs, and it seems to take a delicate touch to keep it from falling apart or losing its shape as it comes together. While most recipes I’ve tried thus far don’t have the bread takes shape or come out of the mixing bowl until the last stages, this one comes out almost immediately and gets squished into a rough rectangle and stretched repeatedly.

A huge amount of flour goes into the stretching and shaping process of this floppy dough. This shouldn’t come as a surprise — even store-bought ciabatta is usually dusted with a healthy coating of flour. Some of the mushrooms are incorporated with the other ingredients, but the majority are folded into the “completed” dough during the folding process.

Baking

Ciabatta is baked on the baking stone (or a preheated cookie sheet), slid from a cutting board or pizza peel directly into the oven. From terrible past experiences, the best tip I know for doing this is to liberally coat the cutting board under the bread with semolina flour or cornmeal — otherwise your dough will not transfer smoothly into the oven, losing precious heat and probably misshaping your poor loaf.

I was successful this time though, and my loaves baked up beautifully in about 15 minutes. The indentations in the plain loaf were a result of my failing to stretch the dough immediately before sliding it into the oven, and attempting to rectify the situation slightly afterwards. Oops.

Results

The bread was delicious — it was moist and tender, with a soft wheaty taste. The mushroom version was especially moist and flavorful, although I might want to play with the mushrooms types a bit in the future.

The crumb wasn’t quite right, however. A trademark of good ciabatta is the presence nice big holes in the crumb, and mine was pretty tight and uniform. The loaves turned out tasty enough that I don’t mind the texture “issue,” but I did have the chance to make the same recipe again over the weekend. This time I kept the dough much wetter, and while the sticky dough was a little more difficult to handle, the texture of the crumb was much better. All goes to show that practice does make perfect!

Peter Reinhart’s Mushroom Ciabatta Recipe

Makes two 1-pound loaves

3.25 cups (22.75 oz) poolish* ( must prepare the day before! )

) 3 cups (13.5 oz) unbleached bread flour

1 3/4 tsp salt

1 1/5 tsp instant yeast

6 tablespoons water

1/2 cup olive oil

5 dried porcini mushrooms, broken into pieces

6 tablespoons warm water

1 pound fresh button or shiitake mushrooms (I used shiitake)

4 cloves garlic, pressed or minced

Salt and pepper

*How to Make a Poolish: The day before you bake your bread, mix 11.25 ounces bread flour, 12 oz water and 1/4 tsp instant yeast until flour is fully hydrated. Let sit at room temperature for 3-4 hours until the mixture is nice and bubbly, then immediately refrigerate until the next day.