This is a recipe I'm returning to. It can be used to make either two loaves of a rustic bread, basically a ciabatta, or one focaccia (or even several mini-baguettes). Although it has been a while, I have done all of these. This time around, as you can see, I went with the ciabatta. I'm a big fan of both ciabatta and focaccia. In fact, a couple of years ago, I attended Peter Reinhart's Saturday morning course on making focaccia and pizza at Johnson and Wales in Charlotte, a course I recommend. Although this book was out at the time, in that course we stuck to white bread flour. Sometime after the course, I tried this recipe a couple of times.
Overall, the loaves were quite good. They don't quite deliver the light chewiness of a traditional bread-flour ciabatta, but they are still reasonably light, chewy and they do have a good flavor. (Yes, I admit that my preference runs toward white bread flours rather than whole wheat flours. Perhaps focaccia, with the distraction of toppings, is a better choice for me. )
As a transitional bread, it will be interesting to see how this compares to 100% whole wheat ciabattas. This is a recipe well worth making again. Perhaps I can find the time in the near future to redo this recipe making the focaccia. If I do, I'll update this post.
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