Rosemary ciabatta with stout beer
Alcoholic beverages
This is a flavorful dough that I created when I was in school and I've continued to tweak. It is great eaten on its own or as a sandwich bread for many kinds of sandwiches but particularly pastrami and grilled cheese sandwiches with or without proscuitto. Some cooking notes: While I love the meditative activity of kneading dough by hand, this is a fairly wet dough and is best kneaded with the dough hook attachment on a standing mixer. One of the ways to build flavor in bread is through a longer rising time. To enhance the bread flavor, I made a pre-ferment (sometime referred to as poolish) the day before I planned to bake the bread, which was then added to the other bread ingredients on baking day. Poolish also helps make a crusty bread with irregular crumb (bigger holes), which I was looking for in creating this recipe, and also provides greater dough strength, better aroma and increased shelf life. Poolish is essentially equal parts bread flour and water with a little yeast. It takes about 5 minutes to make and is well worth the effort if you plan ahead. The recipe instructions include directions on how to do this as well as other tips on how to get a crispy crust. One of my big surprises when I was in school was that I discovered I LOVED making bread. So I've included a number of tips that I've learned along the way that have helped me. You may already know about these and more, and I apologize if it ends up being TMI! Important Note: I use instant yeast when baking bread, making it much easier to work with. If you are working with active dry yeast, multiply the instant yeast amount in the recipe by 1.5 to get the right amount of active dry yeast to use!
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