It's been several weeks since I last had a go at making bread, apart from our regular saturday night pizza. I decided to try a sourdough ciabatta recipe so I got my sourdough starter out of the fridge on wednesday and started feeding it twice a day to build it up ready to use, alternating white flour and wholemeal flour.

The recipe came from sourdoughhome.com but I reduced the quantities to make just one loaf.

I mixed the dough as soon as I got up this morning then left it to rise during the day. I only had 200g of starter so I ended up using all of it. I stirred flour and water back into the starter tub, and hoped that the small amounts of starter left in the corners of the tub would be enough for it to re-grow.

I added around 100ml of water, 20ml of milk, 10ml of olive oil and half a teaspoon of salt to the starter, then slowly mixed in 200g of bread flour. The dough was very sticky so instead of kneading by hand (which is what I normally do) I used the dough hooks on our food mixer to mix and stretch the dough.

I put the dough in an oiled silicone loaf tin to prove. It was quite a cold day so I ended up leaving it for about 6 hours. I baked it on our pizza stone at gas mark 7 for about 20 minutes. I started it off in the loaf tin then turned it out halfway through and put it back on the stone to continue baking (since the silicone loaf tin insulates the contents a bit so the top cooks while the insides stay a bit raw).

I think this might be the best texture of any of my sourdough breads so far. It rose quite well and had some decent air holes inside. Definitely a recipe to try again.