Atta Ciabatta

So, after baking 75 loaves of bread in the one week since we've been back from holiday, what do I do for a break? Bake bread, of course! :) I was making "What do I do with all these green beans from the garden" minestrone for dinner, and needed some bread to go with it. All I had on hand was multigrain sandwich bread which didn't seem quite right with minestrone, so I figured it was high time I finally tried the most-bookmarked bread on this site - Jason's Quick Cocodrillo Ciabatta.

I happen to have a large bag of Durum Atta flour (this is Canadian 100% whole durum flour, finer than semolina but not as fine as remilled durum flour) so I used 150 grams of this along with 350 grams of bread flour, 475 grams of water, 15 grams of salt and two teaspoons of yeast. I mixed it in the Ankarsrum with the dough hook, and let it run at medium high speed for about 30 minutes until it was climbing up the hook (as directed). Then I poured it into an oiled container. The recipe said to let it triple which happened fairly quickly in the warm summer heat. Good thing too, as the soup was going to be ready for six o'clock and I didn't want to be waiting until eight for dinner!

I poured the gloop out onto a floured counter (on reflection an oiled counter would have been much better, and used my plasterer's scraper to sort of letter fold the puddle, then cut it into three pieces and put them (with great difficulty and laughter) onto a floured piece of parchment on a baking sheet. Shaping consisted of scrunching the sides in a bit so they didn't run into each other or off the sides of the baking sheet.

I sort of poked them a bit to re-distribute the bubbles, as I wasn't even going to attempt to turn them over at this point. And I could have let them proof a bit longer but was getting impatient for dinner, so into a 500F oven they went. Ten minutes, turn and ten more (and by that time the atta flour on the parchment was burning so the smoke alarm went off when I opened the oven to turn the pan. Sigh...)

I only let this cool for about 15 minutes, then sliced up one loaf for dinner. The crumb is moist and glossy with a little bit of olive oil here and there from the oil that was in the container during the ferment. Crust is thin and delicate and the loaf is very squishy. Gorgeous yellow colour from the atta flour too.

This is so good, I ate about half a loaf with my soup. :)

And I've still got two more loaves. Not bad for 500 grams of flour. How can anyone pay money for rubbish supermarket bread when making bread is this cheap and easy!