moosh in indy.

Allow me to share my first experience using my baking stone, it wasn’t nearly as glamorous as I made it out to be in my head and several entries earlier.

I made ciabatta from Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook and first I have to tell you how I crossed the line in purchasing a Martha cookbook.

Cody and I went on a date one night to Barnes and Noble, it was shortly after my victory at the Utah State Fair and I was looking to expand my horizons. As you may know, I’m a packaging whore, make it look pretty and I’ll probably like it. That’s what those Martha geniuses did with this book, it’s very pretty. The first page I opened up to was her ciabatta, I was going to post a picture of it to compare my final product and then I realized I didn’t want to cry any more than I already have.

My belief is that a cookbook should have photos for everything in it and that those photos should not be “food styled” with holly berries and crap of the sort. Martha knew this about me and made the photos in her book impossible to resist by people like me and is what also led me to warn people like you about her book.

My other cookbook mantra is that 5 of the first 6 recipes that I look at have to be ones I’d actually want to make and ones I’d actually enjoy. Martha hit one out of the park with that criteria too. I didn’t actually buy it at Barnes and Noble, Martha forgot that I’m fairly cheap and priced her book at $40, bad move Martha. I went home and bought it brand new off ebay for $13, including shipping, dude I love ebay.
I’ve made about 20 things out of it, all of them turning out fairly impressive, some turning out so good I consider abandoning all responsibility and opening a cafe, then I remember all the responsibility involved in that and go back to my daily life. The ciabatta was my holy grail, I was going to perfect my yeast skills, acquire a baking stone as soon as I could and I was going to make this ciabatta. I was so high of all my other successes out of Martha’s book I knew there was no way she could outsmart me with this recipe.

Dammit Martha, you did me in.

I don’t know where her millionaire prowess overtook my humble ambition. At some point between the first two hour rise and the transfer to the baking stone something went horribly wrong (see for yourself).

The parts that weren’t associated with the charred blackness that were created in mere moments were actually pretty dang tasty. Too bad it was only 15% that wasn’t marred by char. And also, despite the final loaves looking like a little piles of bread cement they were actually incredibly light. All in all it wasn’t a complete failure, it was just an ugly failure, and that to me is failure because if it’s not pretty who’s going to be tempted to eat it in the first place? Not me I know.

Oh Martha, fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice…not gonna happen.