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[roadrunnertwice]

So the bread book I've been working from while trying to get a handle on lean-dough breads is Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice. It's pretty good! It's kind of great, actually. Perhaps someday I will own a copy; in the meantime, I had to give the library back theirs, so I ran a handful of pages off on the copier and am holding other portions of it in memory. (I'll have to go back to it once I'm ready to get rolling with the ole sourdough.)

I made ciabatta (or something related to it; naming is always fraught in bread-land--at any rate, it was very close to what my former employers sold as "Rustic") this weekend using the book's recipe, mostly because I wanted to try the poolish* baguette dough and the poolish recipe made a lot more than that recipe needed. It actually turned out all right! And it was quite fun, in its own goopy sort of way. benefitz asked for the recipe, which I'm only too happy to share, but the greatest strength of Reinhart's book is also a significant weakness: it contains a LOT of foundational knowledge and refers to it quite freely, which makes it tough to extract any given recipe as a self-contained nugget of information. But it seems like good practice for future efforts, so here goes:

Day -3 through -1, discretionary: Front-load your poolish

You can make it the day of, too, but that's kind of masochistic. Besides, you'll have a sweeter dough if it can chill in the fridge for a while.

• 2.5 cups unbleached bread flour
• 1.5 cups water, room temp
• 1/4 tsp instant yeast (or 3/8 tsp active dry yeast)

Secret numbers:

• Bread flour 100%
• Water 107%
• Instant yeast .27%

Stir together until it's all hydrated, cover it with plastic wrap. Ferment it at room temp for 3-4 hours (until it's all bubbly and foamy), then fridge it. Should look like pancake batter. It'll keep for up to 3 days, and you can also chuck it in the freezer if you want to have it ready to go at any time.

Sidenote

Bread flour has more gluten potential than all-purpose flour. Ciabatta's all about the big-ass holes in the crumb, and to get that, you need hella gluten.

Day 0: Bread

Again, I recommend Reinhart's book. He has pictures.

• 3.25 cups (22.75 oz) poolish
• 3 cups (13.5 oz) bread flour
• 1.75 tsp (.44 oz; weigh if you're not using table grind) salt
• 1.5 tsp (.17 oz) instant yeast (or 2.5 tsp active dry yeast)
• 6 tbsp. – .75 cups (3-6 oz) lukewarm water (90-100° F)
• cornmeal for dusting

Secret numbers:

• Poolish 169%
• Bread flour 100%
• Salt 3.3%
• Instant yeast 1.3%
• Water 33.3% (roughly)

Get the poolish out of the fridge an hour ahead of time, to warm that sucker up.

Basically, mix everything together. (If you're using active dry yeast, mix it with the water before mixing the water with everything else.) The water content is flexy; play it by ear, you want a fairly sticky dough. The instructions say to "repeatedly dip one of your hands or [a] metal spoon into cold water and use it, much like a dough hook, to work the dough vigorously into a smooth mass while rotating the bowl in a circular motion with the other hand." Reversing direction every once in a while. Yes, it sounds insane. Do it until everything's a fairly smooth mass, which should be like 5-7 minutes. Again, think sticky.

Get a whole bunch of flour on the counter and drop that dough onto it; use a cold spoon.

And here's the tricky maneuver: you need to stretch the dough to twice its length and then fold it in thirds. Basically you use lots of flour, pat it into a rectangle, let it rest for a minute or two, and then do the deed. Be gentle. Then let it rest for half an hour (put some plastic wrap on it; they also recommend misting it with spray oil and dusting the top with flour), and stretch-and-fold again.

Cover it up, let it ferment on the counter for 1.5 to 2 hours, depending on how cold your house is. It probably won't "double" like many doughs will, but it'll bulge out a fair bit.

The other tricky part is shaping the loaves. You have to make this sort of adjacent-trenches structure using a lint-free tea-towel and a thick bottom cloth, all bunched up into walls. (It's called a couche?) Basically, you cut the dough up with a cold+wet pastry scraper or a knife or something, get each piece floury, and fold it in thirds again (to make that characteristic slipper shape) while getting it nestled in its little trench. Again, the book recommends misting with oil and flouring the top (and then covering with another towel).

So then you let the li'l loaves proof for 45 to 60, maaaaaaybe a little longer if you live in an icebox like I do. They should swell noticeably, and somewhere in here, you should get the oven heated up to 500°F.

Sidenote

Okay, so the oven. Stones are good; I've been using a wimpy little 1/2-inch pizza stone, I assume SRS PPL use SRS baking stones or old-skool quarry tiles. If you've no stone, I'm told that you should use an upside-down sheet pan or something. You should also have a sturdy baking pan on the shelf under the stone to receive an infusion of hot water for steam. To get the loaves onto the baking surface, you use a peel of some sort. Real pizza peels are good, the book also recommends an upside sheet pan (again), and I use a wooden cutting board. In all cases, you want to get a fairly thorough coating of cornmeal or semolina flour on the thing to act like tiny ball-bearings for sliding the loaves off. (You can totally re-use this after you're done with the project. Or at least, it hasn't killed ME yet.)

Also, STEAM: you want lots of it at the beginning of the baking process, because it delays crust formation and helps the dough expand properly. Reinhart says to:

• Dump a cup of hot water into that steam pan at the start of baking and slam the door shut,
• ...wait 30 seconds, then bust the door open and spray the walls with a spray bottle of water (being careful not to spritz the lamp or the glass of the oven door),
• ...wait 30 seconds, then do the spray thing again,
• ...aaaaaaaaaaaand one more time. At which point you start the cooking timer and drop the oven thermostat to 450°F.

All right so yeah anyway

Transfer the loaves to the peel (stretching them out lengthwise in the process, and feel free to tamp down the middle a bit if it's a lot higher than the edges). Slide them onto the baking surface and do that baking thing, remembering to turn the temp down to 450°F after you're done with that steam business. Basically, you bake it for 10 minutes, then check to see if they're cooking unevenly and rotate them if they are. Cook for another 5-10 minutes after that until they look like a golden, crusty, done-ass ciabatta. (And register above a 205°F internal temp.)

Cool 'em on a rack.

Chewing over the chewables

Bread is taking up enough head space here lately that I can't honestly tell whether that transcription was any use or not. Like I said, I'm about 70% sure that just copying over what was on those 2 pages would have been useless (too referential in form), but it may be a while before I can do any better.

Also, like I said on Twitter, my loaves turned out pretty darn tasty, but there's plenty of room for improvement. For one thing, I think I may have let too much gas out of the dough at various stages, resulting in a crumb that's maybe a little too regular and dense for what is usually called "ciabatta." (And maybe there wasn't enough gas in the dough period; I think I fermented it enough, but I probably could have let it go a bit longer at every stage and ended up with better overall results. I mean, it IS a pretty cold house this month.) I also didn't cook the loaves quite as much as they wanted to be cooked -- I reached that 205° internal temp, and the top crust was very pretty, but the bottom wasn't as solid as it could have been, and I think I may want to aim for as high as 215° internal to score that shiny-ass perfect crumb that you see in the really superior rustic breads.

In other words, more skillful handling of the dough, steelier nerve with the oven, and better judgment of fermentation and proofing status. This all translates into effortful practice, as expected.

---

* A "poolish" is a wet pre-ferment; apparently that's French for "Polish?" I'm told the technique was invented and/or made famous by Poles.

One of my most vivid memories from the bakery was when I walked into the back to find an unattended poolish running rampant out of its bucket and all over the electric pastry roller's conveyer belt. I COULD SEE IT MOVING. IT WAS FASTER THAN A SLUG AND ABOUT THE SAME CONSISTENCY. Thus, using a poolish is sort of crossing my personal baking Rubicon.

Comments

[benefitz.livejournal.com]

Holy crap. I remember now why I cook instead of baking. Complicated! I need someone to show me. Or at least a copy of the book. Thank you for posting though!

[roadrunnertwice]

It's less complicated than it looks! Or rather, it can be complicated over a rather long scale of values, and the textually apparent level of complication is way over on the right of the dial; it can be a lot simpler, depending. (Or not! I will cop to having a mutated idea of what is and isn't hard, and my re-telling of the recipe surely reflects and amplifies that.)

[gyladia.livejournal.com]

There was a book I read in elementary school and I can't remember the name now, but it was about a school lunch that ate children, and the kid who saved the school challenged the lunch to a duel and ate it all up (I think those were the last words, in fact).
An unattended poolish sounds exactly like that lunch.
I'm glad that apparently you saw it before it saw you.

[roadrunnertwice]

Yeah, I think I read that one. ...I can't remember its name either.