breadcoconut
I was looking for a recipe for coconut flour bread. I found several like this Amazing Paleo recipe. However, all of them are rather flat and seem very dense. I found another site that sells coconut flour bread that looks more like what I'd want. It seems they added baking soda and apple cider vinegar to get the volume (the air bubbles) like you would with yeast.
Is there a recipe for coconut flour bread that's more similar to traditional sandwich bread?
I don't remember what the Lembas are supposed to be like in the original text, but whatever Tolkien intended them to be, the recipe is not for a bread-like item in the sense modern US Americans understand it. It is more comparable to waffles.
This is why it got wrong when you tried to treat it like bread. It is a batter, not a dough. The slow indirect heat of an oven is wrong for it, and it is not supposed to be able to hold its shape as a loaf. If you don't have a pizzelle iron, use a waffle iron for making them. If you don't have a waffle iron either, use a griddle or a hot pan and form and bake the lembas like pancakes, turning them during the process to get both sides baked.
Although I am saying "pancake" here, it refers to the cooking process, not to the final texture. If the chef who made the recipe knew what he was doing, the result can be crispy and flaky, similar to a dried tortilla. It will indeed be calorie-dense and durable, just like the fictional lemba.
As I don't think Tolkien gives anything closely usable as a culinary recipe, I guess that the chef just baked anything with these two qualities and called it "lemba". You can probably take any other kind of durable bread and use it as your recipe if you don't like this one. Knaeckebrod is probably a good starting point, considering that it has similar properties, and it is probably appropriate, seeing how much Tolkien was influenced by Nordic mythology.
Ciabatta should be crusty, with a chewy crumb and big air pockets. Neither "dry" nor "dense" would be adjectives one would associate with good ciabatta.
This is what good ciabatta should look like:
Source: Michael Ruhlman (highly respected recipe and author)
Sometimes the loaves may be flatter, but the chewiness, big air pockets, and crustiness are what define good ciabatta.
Source: Brown Eyed Baker
If you can't find good ciabatta at your store, would you consider making your own? Both of the above links have highly regarded recipes. The Brown Eyed Baker link will lead you to the same recipe as in the video I'm about to mention.
I have had great luck with America's Test Kitchen's ciabatta recipe and video, but it only shows the forming of loaves, not rolls. This recipe describes a method for shaping ciabatta rolls. I really appreciated the video since I had never before dealt with a dough so "wet" (80% hydration, nearly pourable). ATK offers a 14 day free trial, so I'd recommend trying it and checking out that video. These pictures are from my first ciabatta from ATK's recipe:
I was very pleased, I followed every little fussy step in the video. That broke it down into manageable chunks, and made it seem easy.
Best Answer
It is quite easy to find the ingredients of the bread from the picture you posted. They are:
J.A.I.L.'s answer already explains part of what makes bread texture what it is: you need raw proteins which form a flexible 3-d mesh to trap the air when they set during baking. You also need a thickener combined with water which makes the whole thing soft instead of rubbery. In wheat bread, the proteins are called gluten (actually a mixture of two different types of protein, both coming from the wheat), and the thickener is starch (also coming from the wheat). In the bread you posted, the protein is the egg white, and the thickener is the psyllum mucilage. Coconut flour doesn't even come into play; it consists mostly of fat and some fiber, but the fiber is not of the rare thickening kind (as opposed to psyllum fiber). It contains nothing helpful for the bread structure, so they obviously use it as a filler. Of course, it will provide you a pleasant mouthfeel, aroma and lots of calories; it just won't give you a bread-like structure.
Conclusion: Trying to build a bread recipe around any nut flour is totally wrong. You have to search for a recipe which has the right balance of protein source, thickening agent and leavening agent. Once you have found it, you can substitute your favorite nut flour (or some other food item) as a filler. By the way, making such recipes from scratch is very hard, because you need not only the combination of ingredients (in this example, it is easily found), but also the correct ratio, and the correct timing for mixing and baking; these artificially-constructed combinations are nowhere as forgiving as wheat doughs when it comes to leavening. I would suggest looking for existing recipes. Sadly, it would be off-topic to give you one here, even if I had one, but I can give you a tip for your search: stay away from the ones which don't have all three things: leavening agent, protein and thickener.
Probable protein sources are: eggs, vital wheat gluten, possibly extracted soy protein (if you can get a source for its raw form). Probable thickeners are: anything described in this e-book. As for leavening mechanisms, the Wikipedia article should give you enough pointers. If you find a recipe which has one of each, it is likely to end up puffy. I must warn you that alternative thickeners have a mouthfeel which is very different from starch, so most breads made from such recipes will probably be much less soft/cottony than white wheat bread, and some of them might have a slightly rubbery or gooey feel. But the good ones will have a decent approximation of bread texture.