CSA Week 7, and Cherry Chocolate Clafouti

CSA Week 7: 7.22.09

You may have noticed that my posts have slowed down over the past few weeks (or is that just me being very aware of it??) In any case, as summers usually paradoxically go, they often contain more events and fun things than during the year, which means we’ve been busier than usual! I’ve slipped a little behind on my BBA Challenge, but that will be coming later this week – and in the meantime, let me catch you up on what we received in our CSA share last week.

Last week’s CSA share included: zucchini, yellow squash, kohlrabi (both colors!), cucumbers, garlic, petite onions, carrots!, napa cabbage, baby bok choy, field greens, and beautiful red leaf lettuce.

And our fruit share: apricots and sweet cherries! Ooh, apricots, how I love thee — (actually, any stone fruit) — you are so much better eaten fresh out of hand than in your wrinkled, dried, too-sweet (and radioactive-orange) state. No, I don’t have much love for dried apricots, but I do love them fresh, and these had beautiful rosy blushes on them.

How about uses for these vegetables? Well, the Napa cabbage and bok choy I’ll definitely use in a stir fry; I’ve already used some of the zucchini to make my favorite Chocolate Zucchini Cake (you must try that this summer if you haven’t already!); the kohlrabi, julienned, is a nice salad ingredient; and I’ve been playing around with different vinegary cucumber salads, which I can’t get enough of lately.

I eat the sweet cherries straight out of hand while they’re in season — they don’t last long in our house — but I also had some sour cherries left from a prior week’s fruit share, and decided to whip up a clafouti for an easy weeknight dessert.

I think if I made this next time, I would opt to use the sweet cherries over the sour — the contrast of sour cherries with the chocolate was nice, but I think the sweet cherries would have been an even better complement to the not-so-sweet dark chocolate.

Making this dish reminded me that I really do need to pick up a cherry pitter. Of course, you could go the traditional French route and just bake the clafouti with the whole cherries, pit intact, but I have to say that I’m not all that crazy about biting into a slice of clafouti and cracking down on a cherry pit. It’s not that it’s all that difficult to pit them — run the knife around the circumference, along the pit; pop one half off; tug the pit out of the other half — but good grief, it’s time consuming.

Some women suffer for fashion, I suffer for cherries.

Pitter or no pitter, this is a great dessert to whip up in the summer with any extra cherries you may have around. The combination of cherries and chocolate is classic, of course, but to ensconce them in a custardy slice of clafouti…well, I think that’s a great delivery mechanism!

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Cherry Chocolate Clafouti

Adapted from this recipe on Cookthink (from the Barbara Kafka Dessert Anthology)

view printable recipe

Ingredients
2 cups cherries, pitted and halved (you can use sweet or sour cherries, but I think sweet would be best)
1/4 cup sugar (I used some vanilla sugar I had, but regular would be fine)
4 large eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 ounces dark chocolate, chopped

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a 9 inch pie dish or other baking dish.

Beat the 4 eggs with 1/4 cup sugar until pale, then add the milk, cream, and vanilla extract. Mix until blended. Whisk in the salt and flour until the batter is smooth (I find it helps to whisk a little of the egg mixture with the flour first to create a thick paste/batter, then to whisk this back into the rest of the egg mixture. Helps to prevent lumps.)

Scatter the halved cherries over the bottom of the pie dish, then pour the batter over. Sprinkle the chopped chocolate over the top of the batter. Cover the dish with foil and bake in the oven for 20 minutes, then remove the foil and bake another 10-20 minutes, until slightly puffed and just set in the center.

Serve warm or cool.

Serves 6.

CSA Week 6, and Zucchini, Basil & Goat Cheese Pizza

CSA Week 6: 07.16.09

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I have to say again this week: more surprises in our CSA share! But I suppose my delight at the changing produce in our share each week gets right to the heart of what I love about eating seasonally: especially during the summer, every few weeks there’s a new vegetable or fruit to revel in, to welcome back into your mouth and belly after having waited since last year to taste it again. It’s easy to get excited about zucchini, for instance, when I haven’t tasted one since last summer — memories of too! much! zucchini! are long gone, and the taste is like an old friend, come back to stay for a little while once again.

Our CSA share last week included: zucchini, yellow squash, purple kohlrabi, broccoli, garlic, napa cabbage (love this kind of cabbage), field greens, scallions, a cucumber, and collards.

And in our fruit share: a doozy! Sweet cherries and black currants – which I was super excited to see, and taste, having never had them before! They’re like tiny, inky purple-black jewels, bursting with tart flavor. There’s a great article on black currants in the Summer issue of Edible Finger Lakes — which just came out! — and I was really interested to read that for over 50 years, there was a federal law banning them from being grown (as some older cultivars were hosts to white pine blister rust), with New York only lifting the ban in 2003. I haven’t decided yet what I’d like to do with them: maybe make jam, or I’m toying with the idea of a tart, with a layer of jammy black currants covering a creamy custard base.  I also have a whole duck, for roasting, in my freezer and I’m thinking the currants could be part of a terrific sauce for it. If anyone has a way they like to use black currants, please let me know in the comments!

While my gears still turn on the currants, let’s talk about zucchini: specifically, as a topping for pizza. I love zucchini paired with basil — something about that flavor combination really works! — and the pair also goes fantastically well with goat cheese. So zucchini, summer squash, basil and goat cheese were the focus of our pizza last Friday, and wow, was it a hit!

One of the things I’ve learned through trial and error in our years of Friday night pizzas is that many vegetable toppings are even better when they’re cooked a bit before being laid on top of the pizza. This rule doesn’t necessarily apply in all situations — thinly sliced mushrooms or peppers take kindly to being scattered across a pizza before baking in their raw state — but things like dark leafy greens and summer squash taste so much better when you’ve cooked them just a bit, separately, before using them as a topping. For raw zucchini and summer squash, at least, the heat of the oven isn’t enough to cook them enough before the pizza’s done, so you end up with a pizza topped with half-cooked, bland, steamed versions of what the vegetables really could be.

So an easy solution: grill or roast your thin slices of zucchini and summer squash before topping your pizza. The flavor is so much more pronounced, and it doesn’t take that much extra prep time (you can grill or roast a bunch up in advance, or while you’re prepping the other ingredients for the pizza.)

I made this as a white pizza, and the layers went as follows: a little shredded mozzarella and cheddar, just enough to cover the crust; 1 clove of minced garlic; a shake of hot pepper flakes; slices of roasted zucchini and summer squash; torn basil leaves, then crumbles of fresh local goat cheese to top it off.

So delicious.

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Zucchini, Basil & Goat Cheese Pizza

an Eggs on Sunday original
view printable recipe

Ingredients
1 lb. pizza dough (my favorite recipe or yours)
1 small zucchini, thinly sliced
1 small yellow summer squash, thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, minced
a pinch of hot pepper flakes
a small handful of basil leaves, torn or thinly sliced into chiffonade
3/4 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
3/4 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese
2 ounces fresh goat cheese

Directions

If you’re roasting the squash, preheat the oven to 425. Lay the slices of squash out on a sheet pan, brush them with olive oil on both sides, and sprinkle with coarse salt and freshly ground pepper. Roast until the bottoms are brown, then flip and continue roasting until the tops have started to brown as well. This usually takes me about 20 minutes total. (Alternatively, you can grill the squash.) Set aside.

When you’re ready to make the pizza, preheat the oven to 500 degrees F, preferably with a baking stone on the bottom rack of the oven. Roll out your pizza dough onto a peel or the back of a sheet pan (dust the peel or sheet pan with flour or cornmeal first, or you can roll the dough out onto parchment first before transferring it to the stone.) Top with the shredded cheeses, then the garlic, hot pepper flakes, roasted/grilled squash slices, torn basil leaves, and crumbled goat cheese.

Bake pizza until the crust is golden brown and the cheese is bubbling, about 8-10 minutes.

BBA #9: Cinnamon Raisin Walnut Swirl Bread

When I was young, on occasion (for some reason I remember it when I was sick, but that might be a trick of my memory) my Mom used to make me cinnamon toast. So simple — just toasted bread (usually whole wheat), spread generously with butter and sprinkled, also generously, with cinnamon and sugar. It was a treat, and I savored every nibble of it. I even had a preferred strategy for eating the cinnamon toast: nibble all the crusts off first (those didn’t get covered as well with the cinnamon sugar mixture), then end with the buttery, soft, sugary middle.

I still make this for myself, from time to time, and the taste always reminds me of my Mom.

So I was happy to have Cinnamon Raisin Walnut Swirl Bread as the latest bread in the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge: a simple loaf, full of raisins and walnuts, and sporting a thick cinnamon swirl throughout the middle. It was all the flavors of my favorite cinnamon toast (plus a few other goodies like the raisins and walnuts), wrapped up into a sliceable loaf! And actually, quite similar to the cinnamon buns I recently made for the BBA challenge, but I’m not complaining. One can never have enough cinnamon-raisin bread.

I started the bread by mixing together the flour, sugar, salt, yeast and cinnamon in large bowl…

…then adding an egg, melted butter (the recipe called for shortening but frankly, I never use that stuff and it’s not worth keeping it around for just using 2 tablespoons), buttermilk and water.

I stirred this mixture with a wooden spoon until it came together into a sticky ball.

Then, turned it out onto my good ol’ kneading surface (our kitchen table), dusted with flour, and set about kneading the dough. I found this dough to be kind of sticky when it started, so I did end up having to add at least another 1/2 cup flour throughout the course of kneading. During the last two minutes of kneading, I gradually added chopped walnuts and raisins, and kneaded those into the bread to distribute. (That step is a bit tricker said than done, especially with raisins. You can’t add 1 1/2 cup raisins all at once; they’ll fly all over the table as you knead — so baby steps is the way to go.)

Eventually, I worked all the raisins and walnuts into the dough, and had kneaded it enough so that it passed the windowpane test and was a tacky – not sticky – ball.

Into a large bowl it went to rise…

…and rise it did!

Now it was time to divide the dough in half and shape it into loaves.

Since I wanted to do a cinnamon sugar swirl in the bread, I spread each rectangle of dough with cinnamon sugar…

…then rolled the dough, starting with the long end closest to me, up into logs. This is also a bit tricky, since you have to get a tight seam as you’re rolling (so there are no spaces in the swirl – you’ll see what I mean later.) The cinnamon sugar coating doesn’t give the easiest surface to attach the dough to, but it seemed to go smoothly enough.

Look at how those puppies proofed! Yeah!

I then popped them into the oven to bake, until the crust was golden brown. The house smelled heavenly as the cinnamon and sugar and raisins and walnuts and yeast wafted throughout…

Now the moment of truth: would the swirl be tight? Well….not uniformly so, but I think I just have to roll the dough up more firmly next time when shaping.

It tasted amazingly good, though, and we had it slathered with butter and sighed contentedly as we devoured half the loaf, still warm.

You can find the Bread Baker’s Apprentice recipe for Cinnamon Raisin Walnut loaf here, page 147.

Previous BBA Bread: Cinnamon Buns

Up Next: Cornbread

CSA Week 5, and Asian Slaw with Kohlrabi, Daikon and Hakurei Turnips

CSA Share, Week 5: 07.09.2009

Our CSA Share this week held some new goodies: yellow summer squash, garlic (we should be getting one head every week from now on until the end of the season, hooray!), kohlrabi, and a big fat cucumber, in addition to rainbow chard, arugula, daikon, and field greens.

Finger Lakes Fruit Bowl Share: 07.09.2009

And my heart leapt with joy to peek inside our fruit share bag and see these: enough cherries to fill a huge bowl! They were mostly of the sweet, dark red variety, which I love to eat fresh, straight-from-the-hand. Also mixed in were a few of the beautiful golden-and-red-blush Queen Anne cherries, which are sour and great to use in cooking. I can’t tell you how happy I am that cherry season is upon us; cherries are in my top 5 all-time favorite fresh fruits and I look forward to July every year when I can gorge on them. I had heard that the crop might be diminished this year due to all the rain we had (many of the cherries may have split from the excess water), so I was doubly happy to receive this surprise.

When we first began our CSA share adventures several years ago, kohlrabi was entirely new to me. It’s kind of a bizarre-looking vegetable; the shape (with leaves on) always reminds me of an octopus, and (with the leaves off) seems similar to some kind of spaceship, or alien, or deep-sea creature. Kohlrabi comes in either pale green or deep purple, the bulb end growing right on top of the ground with the leaf stalks jutting out of the bulb at regular intervals. It’s in the brassica family, like cabbage, and is super-nutritious: which is why it’s kind of sad that it’s so underappreciated and unknown in this country (apparently many Eastern European and Asian countries use it as a staple in their cooking!) We love to cut it into matchsticks and just eat it raw (something I highly recommend doing anyway if you get a new vegetable, just to see what it tastes like in in its unaltered form). The texture is nice and crunchy, and the taste is kind of like a cross between a cabbage and a turnip. It’s great if you mix it with matchsticks of something a bit sweeter, like an apple or pear, but it’s also terrific marinated with a little acid and used as an ingredient in a slaw.

I just need to say here how much I have been craving slaws and pickled things lately. Maybe it’s because we’re into summer and I’m trying to get my fill of all the crunchy, super-flavorful things I can before descending back into the root vegetable saga of winter, or maybe my tastes are just developing more and more into a pickle-lover. I saw the pickled carrots and sugar snap peas that Whitney made a few weeks ago and wanted to jump through my screen and grab a handful. Slaws are a great compromise; we munch on slaws here all summer, as side dishes or a different way to eat vegetables in their own right. I suppose I should make it clear that I’m talking mostly about any kind of slaw except the traditional mayo-based cole slaw; while I have had good versions of that — Barefoot Contessa’s is a winner — I mostly steer clear of the gloppy thick versions. I do, however, adore light, crisp vinegar-based slaws made with just some vinegar, sugar, a little oil, salt, and whatever else you use to flavor them. They generally get better with time as the flavors meld, they’re great to bring to barbecues or picnics (no worry about the perishability of mayonnaise, to boot), and their acidity makes a great counterpoint to things like rich burgers or pork or sausages.

As a bonus, if you have a shredding blade on your food processor, you can generally make quick work of prepping all the ingredients. For this slaw, I used kohlrabi, hakurei turnips, daikon, cucumber (seeded first), and scallions from our CSA share, shredded them up and mixed them with some carrot, and tossed the mixture with a little rice vinegar, sesame oil, canola oil, salt and sugar. It made a great crisp counterpoint to a stir-fry we had the other night, and I’ve been munching on leftovers all week.

One note about the recipe: I found that for these vegetables, the shredding blade on the food processor cut them quite thinly, so the slaw definitely softened over time — therefore, if you’re going that prep route, it’s best to serve it the same day you make it. You could also just cut the vegetables into julienne, and the matchsticks would likely hold up for a bit longer.

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Asian Slaw with Kohlrabi, Daikon and Hakurei Turnips

an Eggs on Sunday original

view printable recipe

There are two ways to prep the vegetables for this slaw: with the shredding blade on your food processor, or just by slicing them into julienne with your knife. The shredding blade on the food processor cuts them quite thinly, so the slaw will soften more quickly over time — therefore, if you’re going that prep route, it’s best to serve it the same day you make it. Julienne matchsticks will likely hold up for a bit longer.

You could add a handful of chopped cilantro to the slaw; it would make a great addition.

Ingredients
1 daikon radish
2 carrots, peeled
1 kohlrabi, peeled
1/2 large cucumber, sliced vertically in half and seeds scraped out with a spoon
2 medium hakurei (salad) turnips
4 large or 6 small scallions
4 tablespoons rice vinegar, divided
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/2 tablespoons canola oil
1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

Directions
Shred or julienne the vegetables. Toss them in a bowl with 3 tablespoons rice vinegar, 1 tablespoon sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt. Let stand for 15 minutes to soften the vegetables, then drain the excess liquid that accumulates at the bottom of the bowl.  Add the canola oil, sesame oil, and a splash of additonal rice vinegar (I added another tablespoon) until it’s the level of acidity you like. Serve immediately, or store in the fridge until ready to serve.

Makes about 6 servings.

BBA #8 – Yum, Yum, Cinnamon Buns!

I don’t think I know anyone who doesn‘t like cinnamon buns. And I know, I know, some people like Cinnabon or the twist-off-and-bake Pillsbury rolls…but to me, those are so ultra-loaded with sugar and artificial stuff that they’re not worth it. But homemade cinnamon buns…now those are a different creature entirely! Light, warm, sweet-but-not-cloyingly-so, mmm! Making them for last week’s BBA bread reminded me how much I love them (as you can probably tell from the frequency of italicized words in this paragraph), and that I really should make them more often. They’re not hard to make, and oh, the smell when they’re baking! Heavenly.

For this BBA bread, I decided to add raisins and walnuts into the cinnamon swirl of the buns. Cinnamon buns are great, but I love them even more with little bits of fruit and nuts swirled throughout.

The process for making the buns started with creaming together butter, sugar and salt, then adding an egg, lemon zest, bread flour, yeast, and buttermilk. I mixed these ingredients together in my electric stand mixer until they came together in a shaggy ball:

I decided to then knead the dough by hand, which was easy — because it was so supple — but it did take me a bit longer than usual to achieve the windowpane, closer to 15 minutes than the usual 8-10. But look at the lovely windowpane I did eventually coax out of the dough:

Next came the usual step of letting the kneaded dough rise until doubled in a lightly oiled bowl.

I then gently degassed the risen dough and rolled it out into a rectangle about 14 inches long by 12 inches wide. Reinhart says the thickness of the dough at this point should be 2/3 inch, but mine was not this thick…I might have too aggressively degassed it, but in any case, I pressed on, sprinkling a generous coating of cinnamon sugar over the dough.

I then scattered raisins and walnuts over the cinnamon sugar, and lightly pressed them into the dough.

Starting from the bottom edge, I then rolled up the dough into a log, trying to keep it fairly tight as I rolled. The individual buns were then easy to slice directly from this log.

I placed the buns on a sheet pan close to each other, but not touching – so that when they proof and bake, they’ll gently connect with each other (so you get those soft sides when you pull them apart. Yum.)

After they’d proofed at room temperature for about an hour, here’s how lovely and puffy they were:

After they proofed, I baked them for about 20 minutes, until they were golden brown.

Oh, hel-loooo, there.

We ate some of them warm, with a powdered sugar/milk icing drizzled over them (didn’t get shots of those – we scarfed them down too quickly!) I stored the remainder at room temperature in a sealed container overnight, and we had them over the weekend with guests that stayed with us for the 4th of July…it was such a fantastic breakfast treat! I’m going to make these over and over, I just know it.

You can find the BBA recipe for cinnamon buns here.

Previous BBA Bread: Ciabatta

Up next: Cinnamon Raisin Walnut Bread

CSA Week 4, and Cheesecake Squares with Roasted Rhubarb & Strawberry Coulis

CSA Week 4: 07.02.2009

What did our CSA share for last week hold? Still shades of green, with some new treats. Golden swiss chard, hakurei (salad) turnips, garlic scapes, daikon, leaf lettuce, field greens, kale, and basil (nice to have the latter this early in the season, thanks to the farm’s greenhouse!)

Daikon is fairly new to me; it’s a large, white root in the radish family, used often in Japanese cuisine. It looks similar to a large carrot that’s been sucked dry of its orange pigment, which always reminds me of the book Bunnicula (the whole series of which I read when I was young, and then subsequently read to my younger brother, too. We loved those books.) Anyhow, daikon tastes fairly mild and crunchy raw, and mellows even further when cooked; it keeps really well in the fridge for weeks. It’s a great addition to a slaw or sliced into a salad for some crunch, and sometimes I stir-fry it briefly with other vegetables.

Our fruit share this week contained probably the last of the season’s strawberries — with all the rain we’ve been having, the season won’t last much longer. Good thing we got plenty in our Fruit Bowl share to enjoy!

Finger Lakes Fruit Bowl Share: 07.02.09

Since freshly-picked strawberries are so fragile and perishable (and SO delicious!), after I’ve eaten some right from the container and made my requisite strawberry-rhubarb pie (yes, I made it again and no, sorry, I did not get a picture!), I’ve been pureeing the remainder with just a little sugar or honey, straining the puree to remove the tiny seeds, and using it as a strawberry coulis. We had the coulis last week over cheesecake squares that I topped with the last of the season’s rhubarb, which I had roasted with sugar.

sprinkle the strawberries with a little sugar; let them sit until juices develop

puree until smooth, then strain to remove any seeds

The strawberry coulis is also fantastic as a sauce for ice cream (particularly buttermilk ice cream!), or mixed with a little seltzer or sparkling water to create a homemade, natural strawberry soda. It’s so refreshing!

I recently saw Dorie Greenspan tweet about roasting rhubarb, and thought it sounded like a nice new way to prepare it. Sprinkled with sugar, mixed in a pan and covered with foil, the rhubarb tenderizes and caramelizes in no time.

I had seen these cheesecake squares on Epicurious recently, topped with a few fresh blueberries (also a great idea, now that blueberries will be coming into season!) The cheesecake itself is flavored with a little lemon zest, and it’s baked on a graham cracker crust.  The squares are super easy to make, easy to cut, and (topped with a fresh berry or two rather than the coulis) would make great transportable picnic food.  A nice base for many of the berries coming into season soon (yeah!!)

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Cheesecake Squares with Roasted Rhubarb & Strawberry Coulis

Adapted from Bon Appetit

view printable recipe

These would be terrific topped with any seasonal berry. They slice well and would transport well for a picnic!

Makes 9 squares.

Ingredients
For the cheesecake squares
9 whole graham crackers
5 tablespoons butter, melted
1 8-ounce package cream cheese, room temperature
1/3 cup sugar
1 large egg
3 tablespoons sour cream
2 teaspoons finely grated lemon peel
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the strawberry coulis
1 pint strawberries
1 tablespoon (or more to taste) sugar or honey

For the roasted rhubarb
1 pound rhubarb, trimmed and cut into 1 inch pieces
1/4-1/2 cup sugar (I used 1/4 cup because I had slightly under 1 pound of rhubarb)

Directions
To make the cheesecake squares:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Place a piece of foil into an 8×8 baking pan (use enough so that the foil overhangs the sides.) Butter the foil in the pan.

Place the graham crackers in a large ziptop bag and smash them with a rolling pin until they’re crushed to fine crumbs. Stir in the melted butter with a fork until the crumbs are moistened, then use your hands to press the crumbs into the bottom of the pan. Bake until deep golden, about 12 minutes. Remove from the oven and set aside (you can start preparing the cheesecake filling while the crust is baking.)

With an electric mixer, cream together the cream cheese and sugar in a large bowl  until smooth. Beat in the egg and sour cream, then lemon zest and vanilla.  Spread the batter over the crust once it comes out of the oven.

Bake cheesecake for 30 minutes, or until set and slightly puffed. Let cool completely on a rack, then chill for at least 2 hours until slicing into squares.

To make the strawberry coulis:
Trim and half the strawberries; place them in a medium bowl. Sprinkle sugar over the strawberries (I use about 1 tablespoon sugar for 1 pint of strawberries, but feel free to adjust to your taste) and stir to coat. Let them sit at room temperature for about 15 minutes, until juices form. Puree the strawberries in a blender or food processor until very smooth, then use a fine mesh strainer to strain out the tiny seeds. Store covered, in the refrigerator.

To make the roasted rhubarb:
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Spread the sliced rhubarb out in a single layer in an 11×7 glass baking dish. Sprinkle the sugar over the rhubarb and stir to coat. Set aside for about 5 minutes to let juices start to form, then cover the dish with foil and bake in the oven for about 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes, peek under the foil to see if the sugar has almost melted. If not, replace the foil and roast another 5 minutes or so. When the sugar has almost melted, take the foil off the pan and roast, uncovered, 5 minutes longer. The syrup should be bubbling.

Remove the pan from the oven and let the rhubarb cool. You can store this, covered, in the fridge for a week.

To serve:
Spoon a little roasted rhubarb on top of a cheesecake square; drizzle the strawberry coulis over the plate.

BBA #7: Ciabatta

Ciabatta! Mmm, tasty. My favorite bread for dipping in olive oil, and it’s not too shabby as a sandwich bread, either. Ciabatta was the name of the game for me last weekend, as the latest bread in the BBA challenge. Let’s get right down to business as I’m already late to my self-imposed posting deadline (oh well) and my stomach is growling for dinner. Looking at these pictures won’t help much.

I was excited to make this bread because it seemed like it would be one of the more complicated ones we’ve done so far in the BBA Challenge. The main issue is hydration: ciabatta dough has a much higher hydration level than other bread doughs, and the hydration level is what produces (hopefully) the nice big open holes in the crumb. As you can see from my picture above, my holes weren’t as hole-y as they could have been, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

The process for making this dough starts with a pre-ferment: either a poolish or a biga. I chose to make a biga, as the other BBA participants seemed to have good results using this method. To make the biga, I mixed AP flour, yeast and water together in a bowl, then kneaded it until it came together in a ball.

I then let the ball of dough rise until doubled in size, which took about 2 hours.

After degassing the risen biga, I then stored it in the fridge for a long, slow fermentation. I ended up storing it in the fridge for two days, which could only help in developing a good flavor with the bread. When I took the biga out to warm up to room temperature on the third day, here’s how nice and bubbly it looked:

When I was ready to make the ciabatta dough, I cut the biga up into 10 pieces. These were then added to my electric stand mixer along with more water, olive oil, and bread flour (I chose to mix AP and bread flours, between the biga and dough, as other BBA participants said using some portion of AP flour seemed to give better results as far as size of holes.)

I mixed this dough up until it came together in a sticky mass — this is much stickier than a traditional bread dough, due to the level of liquid.

I then gathered the mass and turned it out onto a bed of flour, patting it into an 8-inch long rectangle.

NOTE: you do NOT need to use this much flour. I was being cautious but, well, let’s just say I didn’t need my end result to be so floury.

Each side of the rectangle is then stretched out, lengthwise, and folded back over the dough, envelope style.

I let the dough rest for 30  minutes, then repeated the stretch-and-fold process. That dough then fermented at room temperature for about 2 hours, after which it had grown quite significantly in size.

Using my dough scraper, I carefully cut this mass of dough into two smaller rectangles, trying not to degas the dough as I cut it.

I then repeated the same stretch-and-fold process with each loaf. Reinhart then instructs readers to proof the dough in a couche, which is traditionally a sturdy canvas cloth that can be folded around the proofing dough to give it support on the sides. I do not own a couche, so I crafted a makeshift one with a dishtowel (just be sure not to use a terrycloth dishtowel – this one was a flat weave and as you can see, very well-floured – so it wouldn’t stick to the dough.)

Again, NOTE: you do NOT need to use this much flour. I was just being overly cautious.

After another hour or so, my ciabattas had swelled up nicely and it was time to transfer them to my pizza peel so that I could transfer them into the oven (which had been preheated to 500 degrees F.)

The next part of the process is lacking pictures, mainly because it was a little too tricky to perform and document simultaneously. To simulate a professional steam-injected baker’s oven, I placed a heavy metal sheet pan on the bottom rack of the oven. On the second rack of the oven, placed in the middle, I put my baking stone. When I transferred the dough to the baking stone (which gives it a nice crust), I poured hot water into the metal sheet pan on the bottom of the oven, creating a big burst of steam. I then sprayed the walls of the oven every 30 seconds, 3 times, to create periodic bursts of steam and moisture. After the third spray, I turned the oven down to 450 degrees and baked for about 15 minutes.

Here’s what emerged:

Not too bad, although as I’ve mentioned before, I think I could really have gotten away with using less flour. I had to tap off the loaves to get rid of some of the excess flour.

And here was the moment of truth: the crumb shot –

Hrm. Not nearly the holes I was looking for. It tasted great — believe me — we devoured a whole loaf on the spot with some olive oil and herbs from our garden. I’d like to make this bread again, though, and increase the amount of water in the dough formula. I’ve been reading through some of the other BBA bakers’ experiences with this dough, and the consensus seems to be that the recipe could use an even higher level of hydration. So, all in all, this was a good challenge and a challenge in the exact sense of the word: something to go back to and try again and work towards perfecting.

Because good ciabatta, dipped in nice olive oil, is a hard thing to beat.

You can find this ciabatta recipe online here.

Previous BBA bread: Challah

Up next: Cinnamon Rolls (growl, growl goes my stomach!)