They look lovely! I usually prefer to make even crumbed doughs, though I have made some sourdough hybrids that are structurally fairly similar to your recipe, and have been thinking of making a high hydration jungle bread (i.e., no fixed recipe) to use up discard. I doubt that'll be anywhere near as pretty as yours!

@plllog You might appreciate this.

I brought my mom and her partner some ciabatta rolls.

They were in the midst of making chopped liver which my mom learned how to chop as a child from her dad. He was immigrated from Lithuania as a boy in like 1905. My mom has taken up making recently for her partner who has been going through chemo and is somewhat anemic. While he is not super adventurous foodwise he loves it and loves chopping it to mo’s standards.

That's so sweet! I like ciabatta rolls better than the large ones. :) Should be great with chopped liver. I have grands from the same part of the world, but with more Russian foods. It's my father, whose folks came from German borderlands, who made the chopped liver, too. :) I hope it helps with your mom's partner's recovery!

@lizbeth-gardener chicken liver - in my mom’s case made with onions and hardboiled eggs. Evidently also usually made with schmaltz ie chicken fat. My mom and her cousin have been having facebook chats about sourcing schmaltz.

A very traditional eastern european jewish food.

Yup. Same as my father made, eggs and all. But schmaltz? Sure, you can buy it in bricks like butter, but easier, cheaper and no sourcing if you just render it at home. Plus, for making the chopped liver, better to have the onion, which the bricks don't have. BTW, if you're going to buy it, duck fat is tastier. ;)

Save in the freezer the raw trimmings of fat and those fatty skin bits at the ends, inc. the tail, when you cook a chicken. (Or beg them from a butcher.)

An enamelled pan is best because it's non-reactive, but it's not a big differnce. 1-qt. or the smallest you have. Or you could probably do it in a bowl over a simmer or a bain marie.

Have a clean jar/lid ready to receive the fat, with a spoon in it so you can pour the hot fat on the spoon rather than shattering the jar (a clear jar makes scooping the schmaltz out easier because you can see where it is).

Put your lumps of fat and skin in the pan with a cut little onion, or part of a slightly bigger one, in wedges. Not too much onion because it'll use up the fat in cooking.

Never turn your back on it while it's on the heat. (Bold courtesy of my mother.)

Start the pan on medium-high heat until the fat starts to melt then turn it down a bit so it won't spatter. As the fat leaves the skin bits remove them (or let them fry up as cracklings (gribines) if you have lots of fat and want to eat them). Also remove the onion if it starts to char. Try to leave as much fat as possible in the pan.

When the fat is completely liquid, remove from the heat and let it cool from sizzling to just liquid (i.e., just a bit). Remove all the solids with a fork first or use a strainer as you pour it carefully on the spoon, into the jar. Cover and chill.

When the fat is cool, it'll float on top of a layer of the onion juice. The schmaltz should be a pretty yellow, especially if you used a yellow onion. The onion juice will be yellow to brown. With a clear glass jar, you can see how deep to put your spoon. The onion juice itself isn't good to put in the cooking with the schmaltz. Schmaltz, being just fat, freezes just fine, but wrap it air tight so it doesn't oxidize or take on odors.

Thus, one becomes one's own source of schmaltz. :)

My mom cousin saves the fat from chicken thighs.

Back to bread.... I was semi-successful.

Note to self: Start this recipe in the morning next time.

My super light loaves came out pretty flat but with a thin crisp crust and a soft holey interior.

So next time.

More folds before rising. A few more grams of salt. And I need to practice shaping super slack doughs - carefully.

That looks like it tastes good! That's a trouble I have with ultra-high hydration. Too much water overwhelming the ability of the gluten to hold. One secret I've learned is that a lot of the promulgators of ridiculously high hydration recipes are fibbing. I'm not saying they all are, but ones I've been able to find extra info on are kneading in way more bench flour than they admit. Okay, maybe than they realize, and they're not trying to mislead, but same diff in the end. I was taught to knead in all the flour and develop the gluten directly, then use minimal bench flour, which had been reserved from the total in the recipe, just barely enough to keep the dough from sticking, and accounted for.

A lot of these recipes for ultra-high hydration use a deep bed of flour, not listed in the percentages, to amend the dough. By barely working it in, rather than adding it in the beginning, it limits the strength of the gluten development, which gives the big holes, but when they say to add just enough bench flour to make the loaves manageable, they mean a lot of flour! I've had high hydration loaves that looked nice and round and loafy that sank, spread or liquified in the oven, and few that looked like the recipe pictures. Ultimately, that's proof of insufficient gluten development and too much water/not enough flour. Since I abandoned the ridiculous water percentages, and just baked bread however I felt like it, I've achieved much better results for this type of bread. Note: chiabatta is flat! A much more honest recipe.

I agree although I hadn’t really thought about being misled. My starting dough formula recently has been Peter Reinharts Pain L’ancienne which is super wet dough. I like the methods he uses. But at this point I alter the formula fairly significantly. All my baking instincts call me to knead in more flour. I recently decided I wanted to get better at gluten development. This seems like the ultimate recipe to practice that with... It was impressive how much volume of bread I got with 500 g of flour.

I think baking time I will go back to my usual formula but follow it exactly to make ciabatta rolls. That method is more easy to fitting into my schedule. I will try this again though.

I read Apprentice while my kitchen was being remodeled. I think I got 8 bread books during that time (excruciating delays for tile). Those really aren't the kind of bread I want to bake or eat very often, but Reinhart is pretty honest. I've done more from Daniel Leader's Local Breads (including erata sheets), but have found more and better recipes in blogs than in all the fancy books. Then, I've customized and adapted to suit myself. :) I haven't mastered any ultra-high hydration recipe, yet, though I've made really excellent high hydration jungle bread. Not following a recipe works better for me. My misadventure with the really poor babka recipe, which I should have guessed was awful, was saved by all my less than stellar attempts at ultra. The ”dough” was like pancake batter, even after fermentation. I used a bench scraper and 2-3 cups of flour to get it to the ”slack dough” point! The same week, I made a KA recipe for a really low hydration, hard dough, for rolls. It's not a keeper, either, but I learned interesting things.

I didn't want to go dragging out Apprentice, and didn't remember the details, so looked at pain l’ancienne on Fresh Loaf and in a blog about baking through the book. In that, the bloggist made flat baguttes, with a good crumb that has some large holes, but not lacy like what you just showed. She used a generous but not unusual amount of bench flour--enough not to just absorb the water and turn to glue, but not enough, looking at the pictures, to radically change the percentage. The recipe as quoted on FL is about 70% hydration, which IMO is still reasonable. It's the ones over 80% which I think are dishonest.

@plllog

I have a wood fired bread/pizza oven. When we built it I bought several baking books including Apprentice but I principally use Peter Reinhart’s equivalent of baking for dummies. It seems to be geared for moderately skilled home bakers which is me. Plus lots of photos of technique. I really should revisit some of the other books which I found really intimidating at the time. I understand baker’s percentages and a bit more about gluten development now.

How wonderful! Wood burning really isn't acceptable here, but it must be wonderful! I have a stone that's a bit more than an inch thick, and has it's own heating element, which is great, but not the same. :) Don't mind my green eyes...

I also got Artisan Bread Every Day, which was interesting, but so not me. I don't want a master dough. I want them all to be really different, with different flours, different yeasts, etc. Also Reinhart's whole grains. The others were Silverton, Levy, Forkish, Laurel's Kitchen and Secrets of a Jewish Bakery. I found them interesting reading, but my go-to whites (2 different hydration levels) are my version of a blog version of a KA recipe, my no-knead whole grain basic is my version of a blog recipe, and my sourdough go-to is from a blog, with just a little tweaking that started with me goofing up a little the first time and liking the result. My whole wheat pizza and white flour pizza also came from blogs, but the secret to both is the flour. I should take another look at the books, too, and see if there's something fun to make. :)