Since I started baking bread, there had been only one wish: to produce a French or Italian bread riddled with holes. But it was only last October when I stumbled upon this book that I finally gotten hold of a perfect recipe for ciabatta.
I tried and followed Ciril Hitz's formula by heart, and these came out of my oven:
I was sooo thrilled to see so many holes that I kept on taking photos of the sliced bread for almost 15 minutes.
And yes...the taste was wonderful!
I stored one of the loaves in the freezer for four days and by the time I was ready to devour it, I just thawed then toasted slices of it, and it was as if the bread just came out of the oven.
I baked it a few more times after that to test the recipe and to know if I only had my luck the first time I baked it, as was always the case in my baking pursuit. Well, it always yielded the same appearance and taste!
Last weekend, I decided to make another batch only to find out that I didn't have any bread flour left. I thought of using all purpose flour instead but didn't have any of it as well! So I decided to experiment by using just stone ground wheat flour to make the poolish.
The following day, I prepared the final dough by adding bread flour to the wheat flour poolish and it resulted in:
It still has lots of holes in it with superb taste, not to mention that it is a guilt-free bread (about 36% wheat) that can be devoured with sinful Nutella!
I am truly impressed with the recipe, very versatile but yields very good and consistent results!
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