I picked an intermediate recipe from a book I got as a gift from my mother-in-law by Maggie Glezer: Artisan Baking. It's an excellent book but the recipes are intimidating. I had tried a beginner recipe in the past for Bialy and it took me awhile to feel comfortable with the recipe.
This recipe for Ciabatta was two full, oversized pages. And that was after three pages of introductory information. I was freaked out. I was going to try to make a pre-ferment called a Biga. Which is like a sourdough starter but uses store bought yeast, not sourdough yeast. Whatever sourdough yeast is. According to Ms. Glezer, there are five different kinds of pre-ferments: poolish, scrap dough, biga, sponge and mixed starter. Some are Polish, some are Italian, and some are French in origin. Whatever. I love Ciabatta so I will do what I need to do.
The purpose of the pre-ferment is to have flavorful bread without additives.
The biga is made up of several kinds of flour, yeast, and water. It's super stiff and kneading it was difficulty. Like a trying to knead sticky silly putty. You cover it up and it rises (aka ferments) for 24 hours.
I let my bread rise in one of two places: my oven with the oven light on and that I preheated for a few moments to 100 degrees and then turned off (I use a thermometer. I try to get it around 75 degrees) OR my laundry closet with the pocket doors closed and when the dryer is going. I chose the oven this time for most of the job and planned on switching to the laundry closet if necessary. I was worried that I would forget about my poor biga sitting in my oven for a whole day. What if I wanted to bake a pizza or something and forgot about the sleeping biga? I wrote myself a note on a sticky, "Mind the Biga". Paranoia isn't all bad. Who wants to cook dough in a mixing bowl with press and seal and a kitchen towel?
After that full day of rising, it is time for step two. In a mixer you add more flour, yeast, salt and water and mix it with the biga. The dough that is created is the opposite of the biga. This is a wet dough. Wetter than anything I've used before. You scrape it out and wrap it up again and let it rise again for another 4 hours. However, it's not like making the biga, where you mix it up and leave it. It's a needy dough. I have to pull out of the bowl, all gooey and stretch it and fold it up like a piece of paper. It's called turning the dough. Turning is instead of "punching down the dough". The purpose is to develop gluten.
You do it four times, twenty minutes apart and when you are done it rests for the rest of the rise time. I was worried though. The directions said that the dough would stiffen up a bit with turning and it didn't. It still seemed just as soft and sticky to me. Maybe I let it rise too long (over-ferment)! It was the one thing in the pages of background info that you had to watch out for.
After all that fun it almost fills up my huge bowl and has some giant bubbles.
I had no idea that the bread is going to be huge. I was worried it wouldn't fit on my baking stone or while it baked it would fill up my oven and shove out the edges like a cartoon. I put it in the oven anyways. I wanted a crispy crust. I pulled a trick I learned from making baguettes, which was putting a pan of water underneath and spraying water on the walls of my oven.
My worries about over-fermenting were unfounded. The outcome was fantastic!
Crusty on the outside and soft on the inside. Biga success!
Now Bake That!
