Saturday, November 06, 2004


not boule, ciabatta

so i decided to make some boule, which to me is pain ordinaire (baguette) shaped in a ball. long-time readers know i love recipes, so i wandered over to alt.bread.recipes, where i hadn't hung out for several years, to see if they had discovered an even better recipe than the one based in a poolish i derived from calvel.

and they were talking about a variation of reinhart's pain à l'ancienne, which seemed interesting even tho' parts of the formula didn't actually seem french. what it seemed more like was a ciabatta in a log-gy shape.

but hey, i'm open to new things, so i tried it. it had a hydration of 75%; and indeed i was correct: the stuff's ciabatta, not pain ordinaire.

the original reinhart recipe has a theoretical hydration of 67%, but as you see from the instructions, you actually end up sprinkling in so much extra flour, i bet it comes down to something like 58-60%.

so why not just mix up the dough at the end-level hydration to begin with and save yourself the "pain" of adding flour and more flour and more flour. . . .?

thus i won't bother to post a picture of my efforts, because ciabatta is very "ordinary" stuff nowadays and everyone knows what it looks like. . .

they are sweet people over there at a.b.r., so i'm not downing them. as a group, they just don't really seem to understand very concretely the difference between french and italian bread, or actually between other italian breads and ciabatta.

or maybe they're just overly infatuated with reinhart -- but mr. right loved this bread's sweet taste, so that's good. later i'll go make some pizza dough for tomorrow.

now, to fire up carlos expobar to ensure he's working properly for monday's event!

posted by fortune | 11:07 AM | top | link to this | email this: | | | 0 comments