I'm Making Ciabatta for the First Time, and You're Gonna Watch

I have been getting (semi-)seriously into yeast breads for a few months now. I've made a few different kinds of doughs using different methods. I even made baguettes, which turned out alright, though it's pretty difficult to achieve in a home oven what professional bakers do so well with steam-injected professional-grade ovens.

I've had the past week off, and thought I'd try making something I hadn't made yet: ciabatta. I am absolutely terrible at envisioning a recipe while I read it, and it usually takes me a few tries making a loaf before I'm relatively happy with the result. But I thought it might be fun for you (and possibly horribly embarrassing for me) to watch me try this for the first time. I don't know what to expect, and I'm writing this as I go through the process, so you'll be there for my moment of... well, whatever it is, you'll be there for it.


Here's what ciabatta is supposed to look like, for reference, courtesy of Two Sisters Bakery owner Carri Thurman's guest post on Michael Ruhlman's site:

Light and airy, with a crisp, chewy crust, ciabatta has grown to be one of the world's most popular artisan breads.

I'm using Rose Levy Berenbaum's The Bread Bible for this recipe. Why? Well, it's what I have around. But also, I just brought it home, and it's hard for me to know how much I like a bread book until I've made a couple of recipes from it to get a sense of how reader-friendly an author is, and how their style meshes with the way I read and understand a bread recipe. Breads are like goddamn Gremlins and shit; you've got specific rules you've gotta follow. The minimum amount of room for improvisation makes the recipe writer's task all the more important when it comes to bread.

The other reason I went with this book is that it gives all measurements both in cups and grams. FYI, volumetric measurements (like cups) are terrible for ingredients like flour, which can vary in volume depending on the climate, the day's humidity, how much it's been sifted, etc. So if you have a kitchen scale, I suggest you use it for things like this. It's more likely that you'll end up with a dough that approximates the writer's intent, which in turn will give you better bread.

The first step in the ciabatta is the biga, which is a type of starter. Starters generally allow extra fermentation time, which develops flavor. Most breads that are considered "artisan" breads use a pre-ferment like a biga or a poolish to develop flavor. The advantage of this is that you can make it a few days ahead of time and then refrigerate it, letting it come to room temperature for about an hour before mixing the other ingredients in. I put mine together two days beforehand.

Biga:

75 grams unbleached all purpose flour (1/2 cup plus 1/2 Tbsp)
.2 grams instant yeast (1/16 tsp)
1/4 cup room temperature water (Cups are okay to use for liquid measurements because room temperature water is always going to be the same volume no matter what)

You might be wondering how to measure 1/16 teaspoon of yeast. Generally, you don't (I don't, anyway); you just estimate. Technically the terms dash, pinch, and smidgen have been quantified as 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32 teaspoon, respectively. You're not expected to know that. Strangely, I just happened to come across a free set of measuring spoons for those amounts the other day. I took them home as a joke, but actually ended up using them for this recipe, so fuck all y'all.

So just mix all that crap together, and it'll look like a little mushy dough turd:

Now cover the container with plastic wrap tightly and just let it do its thing for six hours. Mine looked like this:

Is that what it's supposed to look like? Hell if I know; let's just go with it. It's mushy and foamy and bubbly, which is probably how a fermenting dough lump should look. If you want to use it right away, just stir it down and add it to the other ingredients. Otherwise cover it tightly again and put it in the fridge for up to three days. 

Here's what mine looked like when I took it out of the fridge:

Is this how it's supposed to look? Again, no clue. I've never made or refrigerated a biga before.

For the rest of the dough:

136 grams unbleached all-purpose flour (scant 1 cup)

1/4 tsp instant yeast

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup water

Whisk the yeast and the flour together, then add in the salt. Don't add them all in together because the if the salt comes into direct contact with the yeast, it'll kill it, which, you know, that's bad for bread. Cool? Cool. Add the water and mix it all up:

 Stir in the biga, and everything gets super goopy and runny:

So here's where shit got kind of lame. Berenbaum's book gives directions for using a standing mixer with a dough hook attachment. I have an old standing mixer, but no dough hook. And anyway, I make all my breads with my own two hands, so I don't let robots get their grubby little metal claws in my dough. Except that really, really, really, this is a dough that needs a standing mixer. You're supposed to just let it go until the gluten develops enough that it starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl, which takes maybe six or seven minutes in a standing mixer, but by hand takes ABOUT A BILLION HOURS. My baby soft hands have blisters now (this is not exaggeration). Take my advice: if you've avoided manual labor all your life, don't try to mix ciabatta dough by hand.

We mixed the dough for probably ten or fifteen minutes and added a couple of extra tablespoons of flour before the blisters set in and I just plain old got pissed off and said that the gluten could develop by its own damn self. This is what we ended up with:

GOOD ENOUGH! (that's from my family crest)

I covered it, let it rise for two hours, and here's how it looked:

I've never had a dough look like this before, so soft and wet. I was wondering at this point if I had totally ruined everything and if the world was going to end. I decided, reluctantly, to soldier on.

I sifted flour all over my work surface and scooped the dough out onto it with an oiled spatula.

I liberally sifted some flour on top of the dough. It's super duper wet and I'm about 90% sure this is going to end in disgrace and sadness. Oh well!

I pushed the sides of the dough together with my now not quite baby soft hands to give it a vaguely oval shape, then used my fingertips to make indentations in the dough, like the dimples you see on the bottom of traditional ciabatta. Then I pushed the dough together again to help it retain its shape, because it sure as hell wasn't doing it on its own. I did all of this very delicately, as the key to ciabatta is retaining as much air in the dough as possible. Here's how it looked:

Okay, I could see that maybe coming together. I lifted the dough and inverted it onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

Then I covered it loosely with plastic wrap and let it rise for a couple of hours, until it was about an inch and a half tall. Except that the dough rose really slowly, so it was maybe an inch and a quarter, and then the dough was so wet that it absorbed the flour and then stuck to the plastic. Super awesome! That's a definite sign that I didn't do a good job working the dough, but we were already over halfway to the store, so to speak, so I sprinkled some extra flour on top and popped it in the oven.

The way I baked this: to approximate the steam of a professional oven, I put a baking sheet at the bottom of the oven, and when I put the dough in, I tossed a half a cup of ice cubes in the pan, which promptly evaporated and created steam. Why is steam important? It's what makes that awesome crust on artisan breads. Steam keeps the crust moist while the inside cooks. Otherwise you'd have a nice, porous inside and a totally burnt outside, which I guess in the artisan bread community is considered bad form. By the time the moisture evaporates and the crust starts to get that delicious golden brown, the inside is like super ok or whatever, and you get perfect bread.

What did I get? You tell me:

Not a total failure, but not quite the resounding success story I was hoping for. Baking bread is hard, y'all, especially if you're lazy. But here's the deal: it tasted good. The crust was fantastic. It just didn't rise as much as I'd hoped, and that really just comes down to not working the gluten enough. In most of the doughs I've made, you develop the gluten by mixing, sure, but mainly by kneading the dough. Developing the gluten network is important, because the stronger that network is, the more it'll hold the gas that the yeast gives off, helping the bread rise and giving the final product that airy, irregular texture that's the hallmark of artisan bread. This dough is too soft to knead, so the only way to really develop the gluten is through thorough mixing. In addition, I could have used bread flour instead of all purpose, which has a higher protein content, which helps to develop gluten. Or I could have used King Arthur all purpose flour, which has a higher protein content than most other commercially available brands. But I didn't.

The long and short of it is that I didn't really think the science through when looking at the recipe, and getting blisters on my poor widdle hands didn't help matters much. Next time around I will either have a dough hook or I will wear some serious gloves, and I will share the results with you, of course. Not the physical results, obviously, because those are for us, but I'll show you pictures, maybe.