Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​

Ciabatta Recipe

Friends and family have come to like these from the store, I decided to try my own. Very high-hydration dough, minimal working, long ferment, and a slightly cooler-than-normal bake.

  • 1000g unbleached bread ("strong") flour.
  • 850g water @ ~40--50C / - 100--120F.
  • 25g salt
  • 200g leaven (100% hydration sourdough starter)
  • ~50g each rice flour and cornmeal for dusting.

Dough prep:

Feed your starter 8--12 hours prior to dough prep, as per its moods.

Warm your proofing space if necessary.

I heat water prior to adding it to dough. It can be on the warm side as the ferment's not being added now.

  • Combine flour and water, autolyse for 30+ minutes.
  • Add salt and leaven, combine well. "Pinching" helps distribute leaven and salt through the dough.
  • Cover with damp tea towel and place in proofing space (or countertop if your kitchen is warm enough, ~ 22C / 72F or better).
  • Perform four stretch-and-folds with 20--30 minutes between each (waiting 20 minutes for the 1st). Return to proofing space after each.
  • After fourth S&F, place in your bulk-proofing container if you're using one, and return to proofing space for another 2--3 hours, if possible. You can also immediately begin the retarded (cold) ferment.
  • Transfer to fridge for retarded ferment 12--48 hours.

Baking

Remove dough from fridge ~ 1 hour prior to bake.

Preheat oven to 230C / 450F. Use steam-bake setting if available, otherwise put water in a ~5cm / 2in deep pan in bottom of oven.

Flour working space thoroughly. Dough is quite slack, and another 100--200 grams won't hurt it.

Laminate dough in fresh flour, usually 1 set of folds.

Divide dough into rolls. I find a dozen is about the right size. Eyeball these if you're not OCD, weigh them out if you're like me...

Cut parchment paper to fit your baking sheet, set this near your rolls.

If desired, dust bottoms of rolls with cornmeal, and tops with rice flour.

Score rolls if desired. I use kitchen shears for this.

Bake in well-steamed oven for 20--35 minutes, to desired browning. I tend to turn on convection after 15 minutes or so for even baking. Baking to the lighter rather than darker side seems best.

Remove from oven immediately, cool on wire racks.

Flavour is (as with all sourdough) consistently excellent. Consistency tends to be denser and chewier than store-bought, though I suspect they're using bleached AP flour. Rolls freeze well.

Heat at 230C/450F for 6--8 minutes when serving, add 4--6 minutes if heating from frozen and drop to 200C/400F (heats inside, doesn't overly brown crusts).

#Sourdough #Bread #ciabatta #SourdoughLife #BreadSluts

Nov 2 at 4:08pmWeb
Show threadDoc Edward Morbius ⭕​Nov 2

One frustration I've had with many sourdough guides is that whilst they give various timings and such, they don't make clear if these are minimum or maximum timings.

Truth is that there's often a great deal of flexibility.

For autolyse, specifically, I find that 30 minutes is a minimum, and I like to go longer if I can, 45 is a better min. You absolutely can autolyse far longer, though I'd keep it to about 24h max.

I've seen long-duration autolyse dough starting to show fermentation activity prior to adding leaven, especially when using whole-meal flours. Not a problem to date, but something to keep in mind.

#Sourdough #SourdoughLife

Show threadDoc Edward Morbius ⭕​Nov 2

This is the difference between recipes on the one hand and explanatory guides on the other.

I first felt this frustration with computer / programming / sysadmin documentation which would describe what to do but not the why or more importantly how to address specific problems or failures.

It was only after several years of recognising this that I realised that food recipes suffered a similar fault, though we're generally so accustomed to this that we don't even think about it. There are guides to the science of cooking and baking: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is probably the best-known of these.

For my ciabatta rolls, I've been playing with several parameters trying to reduce the elements I usually aim for: a chewy and denser structure, with mixed results.

But the autolyse thing: yeah, longer than 30--45 minutes, up through 12--24 hours, is usually absolutely fine. So if you're prepping a dough batch and get called away to something else, just let it be, it'll not only forgive you but love you all the more for it.

Show threadsport of sacred spherical cowsNov 2

@dredmorbius

Oft use recipes, or rather a book or box of recipes, to explain what programs* are, to the non-technical; so yeah, your frustration with technical documentation tracks.

*including especially subroutines, which amount to recipes for from-scratch ingredients of other recipes