Annarosa's Ciabatta
Dough Yield: 100#
Prefermented Flour 30%
Poolish
Bread Flour (11%-12% protein) 16.85# 100%
Water 16.85# 100%
Yeast (compressed) 0.02# 0.10%
Total 33.72#
Final Dough
Bread Flour (11%-12% protein) 39.33# 100%
Water 25.28# 64.28%
Yeast (compressed) 0.54# 1.37%
Salt 1.13# 2.87%
Poolish 33.72# 85.74%
Total 100#
Overall Formula
Bread Flour 56.18# 100%
Water 42.13# 75%
Salt 1.13# 2%
Yeast (compressed) 0.56# 1%
Total 100
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This is a ciabatta bread, so it's going to be highly hydrated -
meaning it will be very wet and sticky when you put it in the
oven. It also uses a poolish, which means that it is a two stage
recipe. Make the poolish in the evening the day before you intend to
bake the bread.
There are weights here, but it makes up 100 lbs of dough, which is
probably more than you want. You can use the percentages, however,
to figure out how much of everything to put in. Ignore the "Overall
Formula" section, as it is just informational.
Note that the 100% value in the poolish is not the same as in the
final dough, they will be two different numbers.
To figure it out, decide how much bread you want to make. 6-8 cups
of flour in total should make about two loaves, remember that this
will be the combined amount of the poolish plus the flour added in
the second stage. It looks like there is a little more than twice as
much flour added in the final dough as there is in the
poolish. Based on that, I'd start with 2 cups of flour in the
poolish and calculate out everything else from there.
Here's how to do it:
1. Put two cups of flour on a scale and weigh it. This is the
"100%" value for the poolish. Weigh your water, it should be 85% of
the weight of the flour.
2. It looks like the poolish has only a little bit of yeast in it,
forget trying to weigh it. I'd use about a teaspoon in the poolish.
3. Weigh the poolish when you are done. The poolish is 85.74% of
the weight of the flour in the final recipe, so the 100% number for
the final dough should be about 1.2 times the weight of the poolish.
4. In the final dough, the water weight should be 65% of the final
dough flour weight.
5. Weighing the tiny amounts of salt and yeast required is a
non-starter in my book and the yeast weight is for compressed, not
dried. I'd stick to 1 1/2 tablespoons of salt and a little under a
tablespoon of yeast in the final dough.
Hint: Doing the math in pounds and ounces is brutal, use a metric
scale if you can
Here's the method:
1. Mix all of the poolish ingredients together in a bowl the night
before. It will be very liquid. Stir it in one direction for a few
minutes, don't worry about lumps. Cover it with plastic wrap and
leave it overnight. It should rise and be bubbly the next day.
2. Dump the poolish, all of the water, all but one cup of the flour
and the salt and yeast into a bowl and mix together. If you have a
mixer with a dough hook use it. Otherwise stir it together and then
knead by hand. Use the remaining cup of flour in the kneading process.
3. It will be very wet and sticky, so kneading will be
difficult. It's OK if you give up.
4. Put it in a bowl and let it rise.
5. It's a ciabatta recipe, so there's not going to be any forming
and shaping. Don't pound it down, but gently pour it onto a floured
surface and cut it in two. Coax it into something roughly the
dimensions of a bagette on a baking sheet and bake it for around
10-15 minutes in a 425-450 F oven (those are just guesses, but should work).
Handling the dough is tough. Use lots and lots and lots and lots of
flour on your hands as you touch it. Don't worry about dry flour on
the outside of the loaves, that's one of the characteristics of the
ciabatta loaf.
Dave Barrett