Cooking Cheap

The ciabatta tasted so good I’m going to make another high hydration loaf. I started a chef with 1oz of flour, 1oz of water and 3/8 oz of starter last night. It was fully active, 7 hours later. I added 3 oz of water and 3 oz of flour and left it out on the counter overnight.

Today I’m going to shoot for 70% hydration and 10% of the total flour will be whole wheat. That works out as 8 oz of active starter (with is 100% hydration – same weight of flour as water), 5 7/8 oz of water, 9 1/8 oz white bread flour and 1 oz of whole wheat, 1 tsp salt. I mixed that up and it seemed dry to me so I added more water, maybe an ounce. Then it seemed too wet so I add just a little flour. I mixed and stirred it by hand until that was getting hard to. Definitely a wet sticky dough but not as wet as the previous loaf. I let the dough rest in the bowl for 20 minutes.

I dumped the dough out on the counter and with a wet scraper and wet hands stretched the dough and folded in in thirds like a business letter. Then I stretched that in the other direction and folded. Covered with a towel for thirty minutes. I did that again, 30 minutes later. When I tried the stretch again, it wouldn’t stretch far enough to fold so I made a ball and put that in a bowl to rise in the warm spot.

Four hours later, It’s tripled, it’s still sticky to the touch but I don’t think I should let it rise any more. Time to shape. This is a much higher rise than the previous wet dough attempt so that’s different and presumably better. I’ll try the baguettes again and hope for a two hour rise so I can bake and eat one tonight. Other wise I’ll go for the fridge.

As predicted, this is a very soft dough (lots of bubbles inside) and shaping baguettes is a test which I still fail at for the same reason I can’t roll pie dough into a circle. I did use bench flour for the shaping; without it the dough stuck to the bench and didn’t roll. I have a good feeling that it’s going to turn out. Of course I feel that way almost every baking session until the results are known. So far, I haven’t made any mistakes but there’s still time.

See, there was time to screw up and I did! What happened is I got busy and didn’t pay attention and the loaves overproofed on the final rise. I do mean overproof. It was oozing over the sides of the baquette pan. I kind of pushed it back in but by the time the ovem was heated it had oozed over again.

Sometimes you just have to laugh at yourself, This is a good candidate. I didn’t bake them as long as I probably should have either. But they were good. Very airy as you might imagine like soft breadsticks that just disappear from the basket at the restaurant.