I tried this recipe for ciabatta and the dough did not rise. Is there saving it? Can it be repurposed? Or should I just dump it. Seems a shame to waste so much effort and dough.
How old was the yeast you used for the biga and the dough itself? After letting the biga rest for 8 hours or overnight (as the recipe states), was it covered with bubbles? If it wasn’t, it may indicate that the yeast wasn’t viable to begin with.
How long have you waited for the dough to rise, and at what temperature? Has any rising at all occurred?
If the yeast is old or the water used to make the biga or the dough itself was hot enough to kill the yeast (or too cold to promote fermentation), you’re not going to get much joy.
I’ve made plenty of yeast breads that didn’t rise very much when they were supposed to, but I put them in the oven anyway and they turned out pretty well (not picture-perfect, but definitely worth the trouble). Using fresh yeast and allowing plenty of time to rise at an appropriate temperature make a big difference.
Roll it out, brush with olive oil, sprinkle with garlic salt/herbs, and make flatbread.
Or go thinner: homemade crackers!
Here’s some ideas: http://food52.com/hotline/4364-bread-dough-didn-t-rise
Essentially, roll it out thin, brush with olive oil and herbs and bake hot.
How old is your yeast? If it’s old, get a new thing of yeast.
There are a couple of things you could do.
You could make a sponge by getting fresher yeast and mixing up a small portion of dough, about 1/3rd of the flour and all the yeast from the original recipe, and let it rise normally. Then cut it into small pieces and cut your first dough into small pieces and knead them together. Let it rise again and bake it.
You could roll the dough out quite thin, sprinkle some quick-rise yeast all over it, mist with water and roll it up like a jelly roll. Knead it, leave it to rise and bake it.
Make flatbreads. They’ll be rather dense but them’s the breaks.
I’ve found that given how cold I tend to keep my home, the best way for breads to rise is in the oven on the top rack with a pan of boiling water underneath on the bottom rack to keep the oven warm and humid.
The dough is so wet and sticky it is very difficult to work with. The way it stuck to the very heavily floured pastry sheet was comical. It was like rubber cement.
Hm Roll it into a ball, dunk it into a mixing bowl of water, wait about 5 minutes and start kneading it under the water. When the water is all milk from the extracted starch, dump and replace with new cold water, repeat. You are making ‘vital wheat gluten’ or seitan the old fashioned way. When you pretty much stop getting starch, and you have a little elastic wad of glop, you are done.
I’ve tossed this load but I’m with my novice baking skills, this is bound to happen again. What’s this good for? How do you use it?
Meat substitute mainly. If you’ve ever been at an asian restaurant that offers mock duck as an entree option along with the beef, pork, chicken and tofu, that’s seitan. It’s definitely worth trying at least once.
Seitan is a meat substitute, and it tastes a lot like chicken and you can use it the same way too. It does need to be cooked before it’s eaten.
eta: it’s pronounced see-tan.
Aw, shucks! Well, now I have something to look forward to the next time I fail at trying to make bread.
This is funny. I’m in the process of saving an unrisen bread dough. I proofed 2 tsp of yeast in about 1/2 a cup of water (115°) for about 5 minutes. Then I scraped the bloom off the water and kneaded it into the dough and added a bit of the yeasty water as needed to get the dough right. It’s almost done rising now. 
As noted above, roll it out thinly to make crackers. I did this with left over no-knead whole wheat bread I wanted to get out of the fridge. It was awesome. lightly brushed with olive oil i have that has herbs and peppers in it and sprinkled Himalayan pink sea salt very lightly on top.
I rolled these really thin. Baked about 500 degrees for about 3 minutes until browned and took them out. Waited for the oven to cool to 250, then put in all the crackers with the heat off they would get really crispy. My kids were eating them and what they didn’t get I hovered at work today.
Going for another round with rye bread.
Well, I successfully saved my dough - so much that the top split from the base. It’s really pretty though.
I couldn’t tell from your OP whether you’d had much experience with making yeast bread. If you are indeed new to it, you might want to try just making a straightforward white bread like this one (it’s from Fleischmann’s web site, but use any kind of dry yeast; you can find other recipes online or in general-interest cookbooks, too, of course) – it’s very simple and you’ll find the dough is much easier to work with than a wet dough (I almost always use a KitchenAid stand mixer if the dough is at all wet). You could also do something super-simple like a homemade pizza crust dough; I write “super-simple,” but of the minority of people who bother to even make their own pizza at home, even fewer make the dough – and it’s sooo good and sooo simple. There’s not much of a jump from pizza dough to foccacia – that’s lots of fun to make.
Once you’ve got that down, then you can move onto more complex varieties such as whole grains or breads that use a biga or other starter (those tend to be wet doughs). Don’t be discouraged – you kind of jumped into the deep end of the pool with this ciabatta, but making yeast bread is incredibly rewarding. I’ve been baking yeast bread for more than 30 years; I started when I was about eight or nine, and I’m still learning to work with all the variables like temperature, humidity, and ingredients. It’s been a lot of fun, though.
I’ve made bread before. Easy ones mostly-- Cuban, Italian, pretzel, dinner rolls. This was my first try at ciabatta, though. Tomorrow I’ll make a loaf of Italian to make myself feel better.
The Japanese pronunciation would sound like “Satan”.