Ciabatta and Foccacia

I made these breads last Friday.  The foccacia was a snack for Jackie's wine tour birthday party and the ciabatta was for the hell of it.  Both of these doughs were incredibly wet.  The goal is to get nice big holes in the crumb with a crispy crust.  I really only succeeded at this in the focaccia.  The ciabatta had fantastic flavor, but it didn't have the large holes I desired.  Next time I try making this I'm going to add more water and some olive oil.

Using the poolish I started on Wednesday I mixed the rest of the dough for the ciabatta.  This time the dough really wasn't kneaded in the traditional sense.  Instead it uses the stretch and fold method which requires a little extra time for it to rest in between stretches and folds:

After it was done with the stretch and folds I had to setup a makeshift couche to keep the bread shaped and in place.

The dough has rested and is ready for the oven.

End result!

The focaccia also took a long time to prepare.  I did not plan ahead and did not make a poolish to start so I had to use a straight dough method.  The dough was incredibly wet and poured almost like a super thick batter.  It spent almost 30 minutes in the mixer mixing and kneading.  The consistency was about equal to that of salt water taffy in the end.

After almost 5 hours of rising this was the dough.  It was very stretchy and shiny.

It poured right out onto the sheet pan.  I had to let it rest 10 minutes in between trying to stretch it out to fill the hole pan.  The difficult part was not losing all the precious air bubbles!

A mere 15 minutes of baking!

Sliced and packaged.