A DIVERSION: CIABATTA

Today is baking day for a week's worth of my lunchtime rolls.

Ciabatta is a relatively new style of bread, invented in 1982 by Arnaldo Cavallari to counter to the spread of the French baguette into Italy. I have now been making it for a while, adjusting the use of my bread-maker (Panasonic) recipe to my taste.

I live in a very cold house and getting dough to rise in the kitchen varies with the season, so the stable temperature offered in a bread-maker is very welcome.

One of the pleasures of making the ciabatta, despite the use of a bread-maker, is that it is 'slow cooking' ... it cannot be rushed, but it can be drawn out.

The initial step, which applies to most traditional breads, is making the biga, a sloppy mess of starter dough. 

 My bread-maker has a programme for this:

1/2 tsp. fast acting dried yeast + 175 gms of strong white bread flour + 200 ml water are put in the bread pan.

After being mixed in the machine for 15 minutes, the biga is left to develop. I leave mine for a minimum of 12 hours; it has been as long as 36! The longer it is left the more likelihood of wild yeasts growing (as for sourdough). The smell is delicious, if you like the smell of fermenting dough.

One problem that can arise is where mixing has not been perfect (in the pan corners). Here the longer the dough is left, the harder the unmixed bits become. Bearing in mind that the bread-maker is being pushed to its design limits with this recipe, it's a very minor problem, if it occurs, and the unwanted bits can be carefully picked away when the dough is turned out.

Then the rest is added, in order:

1/4 tsp of fast-acting yeast + 325 gms strong white bread flour + 1/2 tsp of sugar + 4tbsp of olive oil + 1 1/2 tsp  salt + 90 ml water. This is then put on a dough programme for 2 hrs 20min.

(Panasonic use 2 tbsp oil. I've experimented with up to 6, but 4 tbsp seems to be the optimum for the dough. I also increase the water from 80 ml to 90 ml).

After the alloted time, the dough in the pan would look remarkably similar to other doughs and fill about 1/2 the pan, but I don't see it, as I leave everything alone for another 3-4 hours. By this time the dough has risen 2-3 times more and is proud of the pan rim. I may cover the dough lightly with cling film if I am not quite ready to proceed further as the surface of the dough will start drying and hardening.

In the meanwhile, the kitchen and oven have been prepared. I have a stone in my oven (a piece of natural limestone floor paving I acquired at work years ago, to use for pizza cooking) but it probably isn't necessary for this;  a flat baking tray should do, and avoid the need for a 'peel'. Additionally, the oven has an old baking tray in the bottom. This is into where 150 ml of water is rapidly poured when the dough is put into the oven, to create steam. The oven is on 250 C and my dough board (an old IKEA deep pine shelf) is dusted with plenty of flour, with more to spare for my hands. There are implements to hand as well. A stainless steel dough cutter (expensive, but perfect for the job), a metal 'peel' (to slide the rolls on and off the stone in the oven - a thicker wooden pizza peel may not move the rolls cleanly) and a razor blade for slashing. I also have commercial width baking parchment to cover the peel.

Additions that I use are: poppy seeds and sesame seeds for topping, or simply coarse semolina flour. Egg wash is useful, if I'm using seeds, or milk.

 

The pan is turned over very gently so the dough is just touching the board and allowed to slip out onto the board. There is no kneading, simply the gentlest of shaping with well-floured hands.  

 

 

 

 

 

 I make 8 rolls with the 500 gm flour mix. First the dough if cut in two and one half covered with a kitchen towel to prevent drying out. The other half is then cut into four roughly even pieces, floured and placed gently on the papered peel. The essence is to protect the air (actually more CO2) pockets. 

I may then slash the tops, wash and add seeds, or simply sprinkle semolina flour over them. My rolls are 'artisan' in the extreme ... I like having different shapes!

The oven door is opened and the dough balls, on the parchment, slid onto stone. Water is quickly poured into the tray and the door shut. Leaving the temperature setting as it is (the actual oven temperature will have dropped, but the stone should retain the heat) the oven timer is set for 8 minutes, after which the temperature is reduced to 220 C for another 5 minutes. Then the rolls are ready and, using the peel, they are taken out on the parchment to be cooled on a rack. While the oven is re-heating the next batch of rolls are prepared.

 

Above are today's finished rolls - sesame seeded and poppy seeded. The rolls are dark brown and shiny, as they have been egg washed, but the crust remains soft. With a more 'purist' ciabatta finish, using just semolina flour, they would appear light brown and 'dusty'.

Small rolls will dry out very quickly, so I freeze mine immediately. Once the cooked rolls are still just warm they are wrapped individually in cling film and bagged together in a freezer bag (which can then be re-used time and again) and frozen. When needed, I defrost each roll in a microwave and they taste oven-fresh.

CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR 2021/2022

 Christmas 2021 and the New Year

In my last post I wrote that my partner, Pauline, was home from hospital after an unexpected complication following her hysterectomy. Once home, she just took things easy and we prepared for a simple Christmas - no visiting and no visitors. I saw a frock in the House of Fraser sale and treated myself to it for my birthday. When I said as such to P, her reply was that she would buy it as her present to me. I think that was the first ever thing she has bought for Nikki!

Days came and went, with expensive orders being put in for some good food and wine. I continued my weekly video chats with Pamela and Gia, although Gia went off line at Christmas (a neighbour, apparently disgruntled at the quality of the local fibre optic IP, cut a section out of the cable when they moved away!) Christmas was fine, but two days later P was in acute abdominal pain again. This time we went to QEQM A+E and she was admitted for a couple of days. The problem was a 'kink' in the bowel which was left to see if it would settle down. It did, fortunately. There was talk of her 'overdoing it' at Christmas ... too much food on a weakened system. P was discharged on NYE. In the hospital she had been on 'free fluids' and a doctor mentioned she should try an keep to a low fibre diet for a couple of weeks. As previously, there was no post-discharge advice in writing, so google came to the rescue and I could check what the NHS considered 'good' and 'bad' in terms of low fibre. Now (24/01) she is being eased back into what we normally have, although mushrooms (especially shiitake) are being avoided and other fibrous foods are cut up very small. It's been a challenge for me, especially as we had to try and find ways of using the excess Christmas food up, but I've become a dab hand at creating different  sauces which she can have strained over fish and meat. Pasta has become popular, as well, which reduces the kitchen workload.

As for me ... there is a concatenation of stress. P (we had started living together way back in 1977) moved in fulltime at the beginning of the 2020 lockdown. My house, which I've owned since about 1997, is quite small and very old, and I had been living alone in it since 2003, despite is having virtually no modern conveniences. Why? Partly because P is a hoarder. Even when we were not 'together' (2003-2019) she has had a room in the house full of 'things' as well as half the garage space. Since 2019 I have been trying to encourage her to clear the space as the house has major structural problems and I want to put it into auction. The apartment she was living in (and we were until 2003) was getting filled with 'things' (one of the causes for the separation). Since then it has been completely 'filled' and she has been desperate that I do not see it. In 2021, the heating there broke down and her embarrassment has been such that she could not bring herself to get a heating engineer in. It remains like that, almost a year later. In the meanwhile my house continues its slow decline (literally) and that causes me great angst. I think that this year I shall have to spend several thousand pounds on roof work (and that is just the tip of the iceberg). Sometimes I feel completely trapped. Last Summer I was becoming quite desperate. There were seemingly endless unfulfilled promises - the psychology of hoarding is truly baffling. Then cancer struck. My frustrations sank below the waves as we started the journey through palliative care. All the talk has been of this being a 'wake up call', but progress is so slow that my mental health issues are of concern. I have SAD most years and when young went through years of clinical depression. Now, the depressive periods come as sudden crevasses which I have to negotiate (mostly successfully), but can, on occasion, lead to spontaneous irrational outbursts. They are over in minutes and life returns to an even keel. Yet to come, however, are several months of chemotherapy for P, when I can only expect her to be in a more frail state than she is now. Life will not be easy.

But enough of that ... I've perfected home-baked ciabatta rolls ... and have started messing them about by egg-washing them, cutting them, and adding poppy or sesame seeds. At the moment, only I have them and each bake covers a week's lunches.

    More: not only did P get me a birthday frock, but my good friend Pamela did as well:

On an even brighter note, we do have some things to look forward to in 2022. A trip to Dartmoor and the N Cornish coast had to be deferred last year because of covid, but it looks as if our new dates will not clash with P's chemo days ... roll on March! Then, later in the year we're heading back to Hadrian's Wall as there are year-long festivities associated with it being the 1900th year since the wall was built. We are hoping to tie that in with a ferry to Belfast and a visit with Pamela and Mary.

Enough for now - Happy New Year to anyone who happens to read this!