Short answer: no. A couche is a linen proofing cloth that supports dough as it rises and wicks moisture from the surface. It's great for baguettes. For ciabatta, which is already so wet and open, you just need a floured surface that won't stick and won't deflate your loaf on the transfer. The image below covers your options. One note on the Chux pad: flip it absorbent side down so the smooth plastic-backed side faces up. That's the side that holds flour cleanly. You can fold it into pleats between your loaves just like a real couche, then shake it out and save it for next time. Flour generously, keep it flat, and don't stress the gear. The bread will be excellent either way. See you Saturday. The recipe:

I can’t do the bake along this weekend so went an entirely different route. Made some sourdough pretzels - salt with cheese dip and then a couple cinnamon & sugar with icing. A very unconventional, but filling breakfast. I used the recipe from the pantry here. Had to add quite a bit of water (teaspoon at a time) to the stand mixer to get the dough to come together. Probably could have added even a tad more. The BF took a good 24 hours. It’s snowy and cold here so the kitchen is pretty chilly at the moment. Rolling the sections was a struggle. Wet my hands fairly often and it helped. Pretzel bites are much easier, har har. I added a couple pinches of dark brown sugar to the soda boil bath (a trick I heard elsewhere to help with color). They took about 16 minutes to bake. I think next time, I’ll add yeast to the sourdough recipe to make it easier to work with. But I’m pretty happy with the first attempt 😁🥨

🍞 THIS SATURDAY: Rustic Italian Ciabatta After babka week nearly broke the comment counter and marbling bread had everyone turning dough into art, we're going back to basics. Sort of. This Saturday we're baking a proper Rustic Italian Ciabatta. Lean dough, 80% hydration, built on an overnight poolish. No shaping. No scoring. Just a wet, bubbly dough that gets poured onto a floured counter, cut in half, and baked into two crackly-crusted slippers with the kind of open, honeycomb crumb that makes olive oil sing. Here's why this one matters: It teaches hydration confidence. If 80% hydration makes you nervous, this is exactly the dough you need to bake. You can't hurt it by treating it gently. You can only hurt it by over-handling. It teaches preferments. The poolish is 5 minutes of work Friday night and it does 80% of the flavor work while you sleep. Once you understand what a poolish does for ciabatta, you'll start using them in other breads too. It teaches minimal intervention. Every week we've been talking about building tension, scoring, shaping, stretching. Ciabatta is the counterpoint. Sometimes the best shaping is no shaping at all. Three paths to pick from: (check the toggle in the recipe) 🥖 Yeasted with Poolish (classic, beginner-friendly) 🌾 Sourdough with Levain (for my starter folks) 🧀 Inclusions welcome (olives, roasted garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, rosemary, whatever you've got) Recipe is in the Recipe Pantry now. Friday night we mix the poolish. Saturday morning we bake. https://skoo.ly/rustic-ciabatta I'll be in the kitchen and in the thread all day. Perfection is not required. Progress is. Henry ⭐🔥

I used Henry’s recipe for a sourdough starter. The details in his recipes are very helpful in understanding each step. I had to adapt the timing of the recipe. My normal schedule is mix dough on Sunday AM, cold retard overnight to bake on early Monday. My AI friends all suggested that would have been too long of a cold retard for this formulation. So after checking with a few different friends, I went with a room temperature fermentation of 6 hours and then stretched the dough into my well oiled skillet. The dough in the pan got a 14 hour cold retard. Early Monday I took out the cold dough and dimpled it and appied the brine and oil into the dimples. It went into the preheated oven for 30 minutes with an extra two minutes after checking to brown up the bottom. Five minutes out of the oven sitting in the pan and then to the cooling rack. We enjoyed the taste and texture. Next time I may increase the temperature a little to compensate for the cold dough. The bottom crust could also do with a few more minutes in the oven. This time I applied no toppings so will add some next time around.

@Henry Hunter Thanks for the recipe! I am also impatient to cut this loaf open for my brothers' birthday tonight!