Boom bang baking

Being an adventurous type has led to all sorts of cooking escapades but never until now have I needed to use a heavy stick and a hacksaw to complete the job.

What a fun way to get back into foodie cooking following a three week hiatus.

I’d burned myself out after an awful lot of cooking and baking in the lead up to Christmas and didn’t feel up to making anything more than the absolute basics over the ensuing weeks.  This was made easier by our family taking a 10 day break in the lower North Island and largely staying in motels, which generally have pretty basic cooking facilities.  

All of my culinary efforts were pedestrian at best and – according to Don – hideous at worst.  In my own defence, we’d arrived at a motel one evening armed with fairly minimal supplies that included a dozen sausages that really needed to be used, some spuds and a packet salad to discover the kitchen was only equipped with a microwave and one small glass bowl.  So I think Boiled Sausage and Spud Surprise wasn’t that bad given the circumstances.

The meals we purchased during our travels weren't much better, with the exception of the unpretentious but delicious home cooked fare served at Kapiti Island’s lodge, and the wonderful Italian food we enjoyed at Soprano in Paraparaumu.  So by the time we returned home, I was revitalised, dying for something exotic, and raring to cook.

Along the way I’d bought a couple of bags of stone ground flour from the store in Foxton’s Dutch windmill and I decided to put some of it to good use by baking ciabatta.

Ciabatta is probably my favourite bread, but only if it’s made the old-fashioned way by making a starter dough the day before, and incorporating it into the final dough mix.  Bread like this tastes divine and has a lovely texture but it requires forward planning because, resting time included, it takes the best part of 18 hours from go to whoa.

One of the challenges with ciabatta dough is that it’s extremely wet and gluggy, and impossible to knead.  So I use my trusty 18-year-old food processor to start the job, finishing with the gruelling task of mixing by hand when adding the final third of the flour.

I think you know where this story is going and, sure enough, half way through the job – just as I was wondering how much life the old gal had left in her – there was a loud bang and thick smoke started pouring out of the food processor. Impressive!

Having come this far, I wasn’t about to give up on my project, so I decided to remove the dough from the mixing bowl and continue by hand.  And that’s where things got interesting.

The food processor will (or used to) only work if a large tab on the lid is fully locked into a slot on the machine.  Trouble was the explosion’s heat had fused the plastic tab with the casing, making it impossible to release.  The machine was obviously a goner, so there was nothing to lose by taking a forceful approach.

I’d taken its smoking corpse out to the back steps by this stage because it smelled so bad and can only but wonder what the neighbours made of me squatting there bashing away at my food processor with a big stick in a futile attempt to release the stuck tab.

R.I.P.

No luck; bits started flying off the lid without releasing it, so off I trotted down to Don’s workshop for a hacksaw to do the job. It didn’t take long to liberate the dough, allowing me to continue on my merry bread making way.

I'd like to be able to report that the resulting loaves were a culinary triumph in the face of considerable adversity, but they weren't.

Until now, I’ve always made ciabatta with white flour, which produces fantastic bread.  But this time I decided to get slightly experimental and use the windmill’s whole grain bread mix to create a rustic version.

The end result was nice enough, although the bread mix was saltier than I’d have preferred.  Using whole grain flour meant the loaves were a bit drier and heavier than would normally be the case.

So, despite all the ‘boom bang’ in its creation, my ciabatta ended up being more ho-hum than va-voom.