Ciabatta
Trying out the Shipton Mill ciabatta flour today, with a recipe from Crust which uses a biga. It has turned out well, I think: crusty, but with a softer crumb than I get when using strong flour.
I hand mixed it, but the biga was so dry that it didn’t mix very easily with the rest of the ingredients. I tried to get rid of the lumps but it wasn’t easy, so will maybe try a poolish starter next time, or perhaps a sourdough approach.
The instructions on shaping in the book weren’t entirely clear to me, so I had a quick google. There were so many different ways of shaping these on the net, these were some of my favourites:
Vincent Shaping Ciabatta. Professional baker who makes it look effortless. Lovely Jubbly, innit?
Wild Yeast Shaping Ciabatta. Looks like these might be square? I couldn’t quite figure that out.
Fornobravo . This one squishes it down just before it goes in the oven.
Update: Two of the loaves have been munched by now, and no rubbery dough bits were noticed at all. Phew!
I ended up trying a mix of methods: some squished before putting in the oven, and others handled like a baby. I can’t tell the difference between them at all, externally, but haven’t seen the difference in crumb yet as I’ve only cut one, which I did purely to get a photo, and then had to eat it, with some tapenade. The trials and tribulations I go through writing this blog…
800g of flour makes 5 good sized ciabatta loaves.
ciabatta loaves
Looks like ciabatta to me, very airy and bubbly! I am not good at ciabatta, often end up with seams of uncooked flour underneath where I sort of scoot it inside, so I haven’t made any for a while, maybe I will try again soon, I have a bag of that flour somewhere in the garage.
This was proved bottom up, then onto some semolina on my peel before sliding onto my pizza stone, so there wasn’t so much flour on the bottom as the top.