#15: Italian Bread

The Italian Bread recipe is very similar to the French Bread recipe except it uses a biga instead of a pre-ferment and calls for olive oil and barley malt powder.  The dough is also a little wetter and the final loaf is a little softer in both crust and crumb.  I'm rather proud of the slash-job that I did on the loaf and you can tell how much is spread during baking.

We paired this bread with homemade pasta and the loaves were gone in short order.