BBA Challenge: Ciabatta

I'm back on the BBA Challenge! This week: Ciabatta. I made the poolish version, because poolish is just such an easy pre-ferment. This bread is very high hydration, which means it's not super easy to work with. As a result, you don't knead it in the traditional sense. Rather, after some initial mixing, you put it through a series of "stretch and folds". (Basically, you fold the dough over itself a couple of times.)

The end result looks like this:





I'm not super happy with the crumb structure. I was hoping for something more open, like the pictures in BBA that are more hole than crumb. Oh well, it still tastes great!

Sourdough

I haven't been keeping up with the BBA Challenge lately. The bread this week, challah, just didn't excite me. And I missed the casatiello last week, which I'm quite looking forward to. But today I just felt like making a regular loaf of bread.

I kind of followed the basic sourdough recipe in PR's BBA. I used 5 oz of my firm, whole wheat starter (I've created a white flour 100% hydration starter too, but it doesn't seem to be doing as well as the whole wheat one...), 10 (ish) oz of really nice white flour (from Mountain Path which I picked up yesterday), a teaspoon of salt, and about 6.5 oz of water. Mix, knead a bunch, wait 3ish hours, shape, wait 2ish hours, bake for 20ish minutes at 450F, steam at the beginning (although I lowered the temperature to about 375F after about 15 minutes because it was starting to get pretty dark). And here's what I got:



In just a few minutes I'm off to a Summer solstice picnic in Trinity Bellwoods Park, so I'll find out how it tastes then!

BBA Challenge: Brioche

I made the "rich man's" version of brioche. It has a lot of butter in it. 87ish percent of the weight of the flour! I made this in one day. After mixing the dough, I retarded it for about four hours, which is the minimum recommended time (it can also be left over night). I also didn't do a very good job of shaping it. The dough is super greasy and not much fun to work with. I ended up with a loaf that was a bit bigger on one end than the other (see Figure 1 below). Oh well...

It smells overpoweringly like pastry in the apartment right now, but we'll have to wait until tomorrow to see what it tastes like.



In other news, the sourdough starter didn't get so much to eat while I was out of town... I fed it this afternoon, and there were some signs of life. I fed it again tonight; if it's bigger by morning we might have saved it!