The Holiest Bread

Do you see that woman over there, doing the booty-shaking dance of baking triumph?

That's not me.

But I'm next to her, doing the slightly more subdued ciabatta cha-cha.

You see, this whole baking project has been (still is, will forever be), for me, about ciabatta. The giant silky holes in the golden crust that breaks into shards when you cut a slice. The slightly sour taste of the chewy, soft bread. The way olive oil pools through the crumb, leaving tiny, shiny puddles on your plate. I love ciabatta, like PeeWee Herman want to marry it love it. And until last weekend, it seemed an impossible goal for the home baker who lacks bread ovens and, quite frankly, a great deal of skill.

But that skill is growing, thanks to Reinhardt, and ciabatta is well within my reach, if not yet in my grasp.


I'm happy with the bread you see here. Toasted it's lovely, and it made an amazing addition to meals of pasta with chicken sausage and squash, warm lentil salad with pork fennel sausage and homemade croutons, goat cheese and tomato, and just plain almond butter. And I practically peed in my pants when I saw those holes! (I didn't believe they would materialize. They seem way too magical to be the result of simple dough folding.)

But in the end the loaves taste too bland to me, despite the careful fermentation process. Next time I'm going to substitute some whole wheat or rye flour for the white to increase the flavor punch. I also want to work on my stretch-and-fold maneuvering to get even bigger holes, and I definitely need some shaping practice.


I laughed as I pulled the finished loaves from the oven: they've definitely got some rockabilly pompadour action up top.

Still, this is the first recipe to get me really and truly excited, which is saying a lot given that my heart does happy dance every time I pull a fresh bread out of the oven. I can't wait to try this again, next time with mushrooms.

And then cheese.

And then caramelized onions. Mmmm.