Loaf 37 – Shapeshifting Ciabatta Rolls

Posted on Apr 2, 2012 in loaves

It’s nice to be to the point where I can confidently make delicious bread for purely utilitarian reasons. We were planning our dinner menu for the week and thought that BBQ beef sandwiches would be good one night. And, they’d be extra good on ciabatta rolls. I mixed up the dough Sunday night and baked them after work on Monday. We had a couple of them for dinner that night.

As my experiment this time I tried out different ways of shaping the rolls, which with the very wet ciabatta dough is more about cutting than actually shaping. The dough was removed from the refrigerator and (almost) poured onto my floured granite slab, where I shaped it gently into about a 10″ square. After letting it proof for an hour I sliced off three strips about 1 1/2″ wide to bake as long rolls. You can see from the picture that they suffered some shape shifting as I moved them onto parchment paper on a peel to move them to the preheated oven. After they were done baking (about 20 minutes) I moved them to a second heated oven to do the equivalent of venting. (I turn the second oven off and leave the door open with the loaves in it. This gives them hot dry air to suck any remaining moisture out of the crust as they begin to cool down.)

I cut the remaining dough into squares about 3 to 4″ on a side, transferred them as gently as possible to the peel and then to the oven. They made very nice sandwich size rolls.

Lessons

• My simple lesson this time is to flour the granite slab much more liberally. Even though there was a dusting of flour on the granite I had to use the dough scraper to coax the dough loose, leading to some severe mis-shaping.