BBA Challenge 2011: Week Seven - Ciabatta

Well, it's week seven in the BBA Challenge.

Let’s call this week the Underwhelming Doubleheader. That means that this week netted two recipes that get the collective yawn from me – this ciabatta bread, and a recipe from Lidia’s cookbook for apple-in-red sauce marinara that I’m so underwhelmed about that I can’t seem to muster up the energy to write a post about it. I guess it had to come sooner or later – I’ve had too many weeks of successes and too many “this is a keeper!” recipes in a row. In fact, I’m doing my best right now this moment to make sure I don’t fall asleep writing up this post, this bread was so uninteresting.

It’s also the case that I have a history with ciabatta, as my bread baking started over a year ago with a number of frustrated efforts to bake it.  I made it numerous times, and each time – over and over – it turned out to be an epic fail. So I’m bringing in a little baggage here. Remembering back to those disasters, I recall that the taste of the ciabatta was nothing special at all, and I definitely recall that the texture was too stiff to qualify as even minimally acceptable bread. In fact I remember making one batch and thinking that the loaves would be better used as weapons than as food. Another time I was so disgusted with how the ciabatta came out that I gave the whole batch to my German Shepherd (Gus). What did he do with it? He promptly trotted around to the side of the house with the loaf in his mouth and buried the bread. Seriously – how much more of a negative commentary can you get than that?

To read more about this exercise in sadness, or to read about the other BBA folks' attempt, go here: http://akuindeed.com/?p=3485

Thanks!

Chris

www.akuindeed.com