Ciabatta Bread

This Bread is wonderful for a panini sandwich and is easy to make, if you have a good mixer or a strong arm.  We have posted the recipe before, but sometimes it helps to see it happen...

First we gathered our ingredients-

The flours,yeast, salt and water

then we measured the flour...

We weighed the flours...we have found a kitchen scale to be a great help for many applications....

Added the salt, yeast and warm water...

Then we started the KitchenAid mixer...

We ran the mixer at a medium-high speed (6-8 on the Kitchen aid). This time it took just over 11 minutes to form a ball around the beater.  We are doing a half recipe so we just used the beater the whole time instead of switching to the dough hook.  This is what you want to see: stringy dough around the beater

Then we placed the wet dough into an oiled bowl to triple in size...(this took about 3 hours), top with plastic or towel while rising.

Then we divided the dough in two. Note:  This dough is very wet and sticky! (so place it on a well floured surface) let it rise for 45 minutes while you preheat your oven to 500. We cook ours on a stone but you can also cook it on a cookie sheet.  Use a pizza peel (well floured) or a rimless cookie sheet, and carefully put the dough on them, stretching them a bit into rectangles, and slide them onto the hot stone or cookie sheet.  Sorry we missed a picture of this.

Bake for about 15 minutes. Until nice and browned on the outside. As you can see, it really doesn't matter what shape they end up, they are still delicious!  Enjoy, and let us know if you try it.

This was the original recipe: (below is where we halved it with our measurements)  Original makes about 4 loaves.

350g bread flour 

150g semolina flour 

475-485g (~2cups) water 

2 tsp. yeast 

15g salt

Recipe:

Note: we halved the original recipe because we are cooking for only two. So this is what we used.

Bread Flour       6 1/4 oz. (1 cup + 2 1/2 Tablespoons)

Semolina Flour  2 5/8 oz.  (1/3 cup + 2 Tablespoons)

Salt   1 1/2 teaspoons

Yeast  1 teaspoon

Water   8 1/4 oz.  ( 1 1/16 cups)

NOTE: You can use all bread flour if desired instead of the semolina

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