Ciabatta - what's that all about?

I think you have to be a special kind of person to make ciabatta properly. An Italian, preferably. It certainly isn't a walk in the park. Still, I keep having a go now and then, and this time I took my first couple of steps towards a successful ciabatta. It's still a long way from right, but it's a start.

Wet wet wet

At least there is one thing everybody is agreed about. Ciabatta needs to be wet, or it's just not ciabatta. On one of my earlier attempts, I tried to make ciabatta at 100% hydration. That is, 100 g water for every 100 g of flour. That just didn't work, because no flour can absorb that amount of water, and no amount of yeast can raise dough as wet as that. It's batter, really, not dough.

So lesson one says make thy ciabatta at 80% hydration. Paul Hollywood then adds an extra 10% of oil, making his dough 88% hydration, but his recipe is not real ciabatta, because he is rushing it through with lots of yeast. You can see the difference between Paul Hollywood's alleged ciabatta and the real thing -

Lenta lievitazione e lunga maturazione

Lesson two says if you are making Italian bread, you have to do it properly. You can't just cut corners and expect it to come out the same. The Italians really care about the results, and they care about the ingredients and the process, because without getting those right, you just won't get the results right either.

Just look at this menu from the bread shop attached to a trattoria in Florence -

"A lievito naturale" - natural levain. "Farina macinata a pietra a lievito madre" - sourdough made with stoneground flour. "Integrale a lievito madre" - wholemeal sourdough. "Farina di grano duro a lievito madre" - sourdough made with strong flour. (That last one implies that it's normal to use "soft grain", i.e. less strong flour, in bread. Low-protein flour is supposed to be better for flavour, but not so good at rising as the higher protein flours we take for granted these days.)  Even the tray baked pizza ("in teglia") is sourdough.

Try doing that at Gregg's.

Ciabatta a lievito madre

I'm currently feeding my sourdough starter quite regularly, in the run up to a day's sourdough baking at the Heron Corn Mill's Sourdough Saturday event. So when I decided to make some ciabatta, I thought I'd throw some of my spare starter into my ciabatta. It didn't seem like a bad idea - after all, the Florence bread shop menu includes a sourdough ciabatta, so it's obviously a thing.

But I should have known that when it comes to sourdough, it's never a good idea to do anything on the spur of the moment. I didn't think it through, and I didn't have the experience to see the problem that was coming my way. Still, that is usually how you learn things, so in the long run it was a good thing.

What's the point of a sponge?

When you make any long rise bread, you develop flavour by taking a fraction of the flour - a quarter, the way I do it - and letting some sourdough or commercial yeast get to work on the flour for a long time, typically overnight. Then on baking day you add the rest of the flour.

Why not just mix the whole lot up and let it all take a long time to rise? Isn't that the same thing? Well no it's not, actually. From experience, I have found that a sourdough mixture definitely develops stronger if you give it a number of smaller feeds rather than one big feed. And in particular, if each feed at least doubles the size of the starter. That is the way to get the mixture really vigorous when you want to bake with it. Just dumping a huge amount of food onto the sourdough and walking away is really just asking for trouble.

What's the method with ciabatta?

The classic recipe is to mix everything up together with a tiny amount of yeast, and let it rise overnight. It's not about getting it really vigorous and then making dough - with ciabatta, you let it dawdle along at its own pace, and then bake it when it's done as much rising as it can be bothered to. No knocking it back to distribute the gas evenly, no tightening the dough and letting it rise again.

So what happens with sourdough ciabatta?

When I've made a country loaf in the past, with a mixture of sourdough sponge and commercial yeast, the fast acting commercial yeast has completely overpowered the sourdough, and it's only in the texture that you can recognise the presence of the sourdough. You get a firm crumb, but no sourness to speak of.

When I put a good dollop of sourdough starter into my ciabatta, along with a tiny amount of commercial yeast, the sourdough completely overpowered the commercial yeast. There was more sourdough starter than commerial yeast, and what must have seemed like a huge amount of flour to feed on, and all the time in the world.

So instead of a quarter sized sourdough sponge getting 3 hours or so to fight against loads of commercial yeast for food , I ended up with a full sized pool of sourdough which had had 16 hours to gorge itself and very little competition from commercial yeast.

I should have realised it was going to end up way too sour.

Steps towards a ciabatta

The first thing to do is watch a video or two, and preferably more than once. These two are both pretty accurate, I think, and well worth watching.

The American version

The Geordie version

The American guy is a bit of a dude, but they are both doing the thing pretty well. The American doesn't use a dough hook, in fact he just doesn't attempt to work the dough at all. The Geordie suggests a dough hook might be useful. Paul Hollywood says a dough hook is essential. I don't have a dough hook. The dough in this picture has simply sat in the bowl for about 16 hours. It is extremely soft and loose-structured. There is no chance at all of working it in the normal way - it is simply too wet. The only way you can develop dough like this is to pick it up from both sides with wet hands and then put it down again. The dough's own weight stretches it, and as you put it back in the bowl you are effectively folding it in half.  

At this stage, the ciabatta mix looks very similar to a very active sourdough sponge. That is a good sign.

I think it is worth watching some videos again before trying to shape ciabatta, because it's really tricky. And you really want lots of flour on the work top.

The classic steps are -

• rise for 16 hours in a bowl
• turn onto a floured surface and shape the dough into a broad rectangle
• cut in two lengthwise
• leave to rest
• turn each loaf in turn onto a peel and into the oven

Depending on whether you used a dough hook, you may decide it is just impossible to risk turning the dough over onto a peel. I decided mine was just too fragile to handle that way, so I moved it onto the tray with two scrapers as described in the Geordie video. If you are turning the bread onto a peel, you need to dust the top of the dough so it won't stick when you turn it over.

I decided it was too risky trying to handle my dough like that, so I used the Geordie man's approach, which is to scoop up the dough with two scrapers, and then just stretch it out again onto the tray as I removed the scrapers from underneath.

You can straighten the sides of the dough by simply pushing flour underneath with a scraper. The dough will slide on the flour and not stick to the scraper.

Making the classic shape just involves pressing down with the scraper a couple of times and pushing the dough sideways a little.

Because the dough is so soft, shaping it may have altered the length of the loaf so it's worth checking whether the bread will still fit on the tray.

This only matters if you are turning the loaves over onto a peel. If you are using the technique shown in the Geordie video, you just scoop the dough up with two scrapers, one at each end, and then just lay it down on the tray and quickly pull the scrapers out again. The dough will shorten and stretch like a concertina.

After this really frightening manoeuvre, both the dough and the baker need a good rest.

With practice, I am sure I will get something that looks more like a slipper than these two. But I'm going in the right direction. No more sourdough in my ciabatta mixture next time though.