I decided to bake my mum and dad some ciabatta for their wedding anniversary. Why? That’s easy:
1) I wanted to bake some ciabatta, but my pancreas would explode if I ate everything I made, so I’ve started fobbing it all off on whichever idiot happened to be nearest. In this case it was my parents, and
2) I am one cheap motherfucker.
Understood? Good. HERE’S HOW YOU BLOODY MAKE CIABATTA, THEN.
STEP ONE: Make some dough in a mixer because it’s wet and oh your delicate hands.
STEP TWO: Read in the recipe that you’re supposed to let the dough rise in a square tub. Then think “Oh fuck that. I obviously know much better than the professional baker who wrote the recipe and has probably made ciabatta more than zero times in his life”. So let the dough rise in a round bowl. Then tip it out, realise that the ciabatta looks hopelessly shitty, then spend a full day afterwards feeling ashamed of yourself. Oh, and split it into four pieces.
STEP THREE: Grossly misunderstand the phrase ‘heavily flour the dough’ in the recipe, and cover everything in so much flour that you basically render it more or less completely inedible.
STEP FOUR: Bake, leave to cool and kid yourself that you’re a good son. You’re not a good son. You’re a terrible son. You never phone your mum, and your ciabattas are all fucked up.
STEP FIVE: Give the ciabattas to your mum, who’ll look at them and not really know what to do with them, and then serve them up for breakfast and try to be polite about how they taste, unlike your dad who’ll just eat a tiny slice of one of them and then basically pull the same face that he would if you shat in his mouth in his sleep.
STEP SIX: Just burn your fucking kitchen down. Seriously, it’ll be quicker and less upsetting than actually cleaning up all the mess you made. Never make ciabatta for your mum and dad again.
Recipe stolen from How To Bake by Paul Hollywood.
