January 5, 2012 - 2:19pm
Craig Ponsford's Ciabatta from Artisan Baking- help with crumb?
This is from Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking. Wonderful flavor, glossy sheen to the crumb and slightly chewy, can't wait to make it again. The only issue I had was that the large holes were clustered just under the top crust, rather than being more or less evenly distributed throughout the crumb. And the crumb in the bottom half of the loaf was more dense, with no large holes. Anyone know how I might improve upon that?
My thoughts focused on either more aggressive dimpling, or on proofing less. It's a yeast-leavened dough with a 24hr biga and a touch of whole rye and whole wheat. My biga was supposed to triple in 24 hrs but only reached 2.5x by 28 hrs, by which time I went ahead with the recipe.