Spot the Difference

Both my sister and my mum have recently started buying bread mix from Lidl and raving about the bread they have made.  Having tried the sunflower bread, a dark bread packed with sunflower seed flavour I could see their point.  Easy and really tasty.  They do four flavours in all but the one my sister was most positive about, the ciabatta mix, has never been in stock when I have popped in to try and get my hands of a bag.  Mum to the rescue and I am now in possession of this prized mix.  I wanted to see just how good it was so what else could I do but a taste test?

Armed with Paul Hollywood's "100 Great Breads" and an afternoon to myself, I shut myself in the kitchen. Home baked ciabatta is not a thing to be undertaken in a hurry.  You set off by making a "starter" of a very wet dough made with bread flour, yeast and water.  This has to be left for at least 4 hours and preferably over-night. At this point, you really get a feel for the liveliness of yeast.  The mix bubbles away and begins to look like a lunar landscape.  By now, I have mixed the Lidl mix and they were both sat happily proofing,

As you can see, they look dramatically different, with the home made starter on the left.

After this proving, the mix was slapped on to a baking tray and left or another 40 minutes before being baked in the oven for 25 minutes.  The home made version is mixed with  more flour, some olive oil an more water and whisked for 5 minutes.  When I say whisked, I mean stabbed, poked and pulled about with a whisk.  It was not exactly a whiskable texture!

The dough is then left to rise again before going through a similar process as the packet mix.  The finished products were both pretty decent but how did they compare?  Well, on a blind tasting, you could not tell any difference in taste at all.  The packet mix had a very slightly more open texture but they were both recognisably ciabatta.

The real difference is the time involved.  The packet mix took less than 2 hours from opening the packet to tucking into the warm bread.  Making a loaf from scratch was an eight hour task.  So, if you are in a hurry for some Italian bread, I would recommend the packet mix but it is still tremendously satisfying to know you can do it yourself.