Bread Tunneling
Please help! This is ciabatta bread I made this morning and it has a huge tunnel in the middle. Heres the recipe:
Poolish with 1/8th tsp instant yeast, 1 cup flour, 1/2 cup water. Let sit 12 hrs.
The next day add 2 cups flour, 3/4 c water, 1/4 c milk, 1/2 tsp instant yeast, 1 1/2 tsp salt. Mix with a paddle attachment and then with the dough hook. I probably mixed for about 5-7 minutes.
Then let rise in bowl for 1 hr. Fold the dough onto itself twice with 30 min in between. Then shape the dough on a floured surface. So I put down flour, added the dough, let it get covered in flour and folded it like an envelope. I let it rise again for 30 minutes. Before the oven I pressed the dough down a little to form a large rectangle. I also added water before the oven.
Oven for 25 min at 450 on a preheated pizza stone. I let it cool all the way before cutting. Any ideas why this tunneling may be happening?
Thank you!
This is common in real ciabatta and a common joke in Italy is to say that this is where the baker sleeps. Lots of us making ciabatta would love to see this in our bread. Looks great !!
hey thanks! I'm making another loaf tonight, I'm curious if it will happen again. I also looked it up and wonder if maybe it was my poor shaping skills.
This is the first time I have every heard someone call that a feature they would love to see. I randomly grabbed one of many definitions off the web that describes it this way:
Frequently, not shaping loaves correctly, or over proofing them, or both, has led to the finished bread coming out of the oven either completely exploded or featuring “the room where the baker sleeps”: a large hole running right through the loaf just under the crust.
By the way the word ciabatta means "slipper".in Italian. If you think about what it looks like when baked it looks kind of like a slipper. This bread is now very popular in Italy. I am not Italian or from an Italian background but worked there a lot in the late 90's before retirement. My wife tells me I made 18 trips there between 1995 and 2000. Good folks and they have had a really really rough time with Covid. I worked in the metals industry and we had a plant near Venice. Loved the food and the food around Venice is not what most American think of as Italian.
How cool is that! I have always dreamt of visiting Italy, I have distant family that lives there and my dad visited years ago when he was younger.
It totally does look like a slipper. U learn something new every day :)
Hey Alissa,
Did you ever figure this out? I am having the same issues with my ciabatta and in my focaccia at times. Wasn't sure if it was due to not inverting either when put in oven (i.e. the top of the dough when proofing becoming the bottom of the bread)