Ciabatta - getting a rise

After the previous week's descent into darker, earthier breads, this weekend it was all about the light. Specifically the lightness caused by air, and the challenges of building air into bread with just ordinary ingredients and ordinary hands. If one half of the challenge involves the creation of gluten (see previous entry), then the other half of the magic is the rising agent itself: yeast.

Like most amateur bakers, I use dried instant yeast for its consistency and convenience, and try to extract the maximum lift with the tools at my disposal, so it's interesting to look at the factors that impact upon yeast's effectiveness. Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Baker's yeast, is truly a thing of wonder. One of our oldest living relatives, having thrown in its evolutionary lot with the fungi half a billion or so years ago, it continues to live all around us if you know where to look. Our anaerobic cousin feasts on the sugars in starch and produces the lovely CO2 that stops our bread from collapsing. So far, so Paul Hollywood.

But It's more complicated than that, because yeast is a fussy fungi. Quite a lot of things will inhibit its growth, such as salt and fats (this is why you keep yeast and salt separate in the bowl). Not to mention sugar itself - too much of the glucose it lives off actually slows down its functions. In fact, pretty much everything that makes a bread taste interesting also can potentially stop it becoming bread. So when we come to create our daily loaves, we are in a constant trade off with our capricious cerevisiae, caught between creating a recipe that will grow into something edible and one that will actually be worth eating. No one wants to eat the world's blandest loaf, no matter how light and airy.

Squelch. 4 parts water to 5 flour.

So we come to ciabatta, an Italian loaf with the internal architecture of Swiss cheese. It is, effectively, a collection of holes baked in very close proximity, which requires the effective cooperation between our two baking symbionts: yeast and gluten, maximising the conditions for both and eliminating anything superfluous. Just flour, yeast, olive oil, water and a little salt.

Essentially this means two things. One, wetness. Lots of it. About 25% more water than typical loaf ratios, because water is the key to flour releasing the gluten (see left). Two, hard work, because there is a lot of pounding required. I hesitate to call it kneading, it's forgoing the use of one your hands for 20 minutes as you stick it into a glob, pulling and stretching until it comes away clean from the bowl as a single piece of ectoplasm.

Eventually the dough will lift clean away

This elasticity gives the bread its unique character, and you can't cut corners at this point. The kneading not only works the gluten into its stretchy condition, thanks to the abundance of water, but breaks down the starch into sugars for the yeast to feed on. More pounding means more food for the yeast, more CO2 to be trapped by more gluten. It's a virtuous cycle.

Having done your hard work, it's time to add my favourite ingredient: time. Mother nature now needs to do the heavy lifting to create the honeycomb structure. Place your dough into a square plastic (or glass) container, sealed with clingfilm, and leave somewhere warm for 2 hours. I've found out the hard way that this must be glass or plastic - you can't leave it in the metal mixing bowl. I'm sure there is a scientific explanation why the material matters, but I don't know why. You are providing the dough a surface to climb up and metal's cold, sheer smoothness offers no grip.

Before

After

Using a square box also helps give a shape to the bread or as much of a shape to the oozing mass. It's still very wet at this stage, though by now more stringy - like mozzarella on a hot pizza - and needs to be coaxed into thin rectangular-ish shapes to create that classic 'slipper' shape (which is what ciabatta means in Italian). Another 10 minutes or so resting on the baking trays to let some bubbles surface and it's good for the oven, 25 mins at 220 degrees.

The result of surprisingly little effort should be visible in the cross section: crusty exterior, springy inside, with cavernous bubble holes and an olive oil sheen. The perfect bread, and a noticeable improvement on the rubbery things passing themselves off  as ciabatta in supermarket aisles.

I've said previously that, for me, the end product of breadmaking is almost irrelevant, in that whether it succeeds or fails as something to eat is less important than what I learn. With ciabatta, the end point is affirmation of the approach and philosophy: to be able to produce that genuinely tastes better than store bought bread, unmasked by additional flavours or fancy ingredients, is enormously satisfying. It's food for the soul.