The Bakery · Bread
Ciabatta
- Advanced
- 4 h 20 m
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with a briny, maritime salinity.
Ingredients
- 500g bread flour
- 400ml water: 80% hydration; yes, it will feel like wallpaper paste; hold your nerve
- 7g yeast; 10g salt; 1 tbsp olive oil
- A biga head start: 150g flour + 100ml water + pinch yeast, overnight
- A bench scraper, wet hands, and acceptance
The skills inside
Steaming: basket, leaf and lidShaping by handProofing: the rise before the oven
Allergen screen
Found: gluten
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Mix biga with everything; no kneading: instead, four sets of stretch-and-folds in the bowl over 2 h with wet hands. 120 min
- Pour (yes, pour) onto a heavily floured surface; do not degas; cut rough slippers with the scraper.
- Proof 45 min on floured cloth, seam-up; flip onto a hot steel with conviction. 45 min
- Bake at 240°C with steam, 20–22 min. The open, glossy, irregular crumb is the entire point of your suffering. 22 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Proofing: the rise before the oven 78 recipes
- Judged on volume against the container rather than on the clock: visibly grown, and grown by roughly the amount the recipe describes.
- The poke test agrees: a floured fingertip pressed a centimetre in leaves a dent that springs back slowly and only part of the way. Straight back means it is not ready; no spring at all means it has gone.
- The surface is domed, smooth, and slightly sheened: not cratered, wrinkled, or collapsed, and not skinned over and dry from proofing uncovered.
- Handled, it feels alive and airy: light for its size, with bubbles visible under the skin.
- It springs in the oven: the piece lifts in the first minutes and the scores open. A shape that does not move at all was proofed past its point before it went in.
Where it goes wrong It was proofed to the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed: overproofed, it collapses as the blade touches it and bakes flat and dense with a sour edge; underproofed, it tears at the side and bakes tight.
Shaping by hand 85 recipes
- The pieces match: weighed, or judged against each other rather than by dividing the mass by eye, so that no piece is half again the size of its neighbour.
- Surfaces are smooth and unbroken with no cracks, tears, or dry patches, and the seams are sealed and sitting underneath.
- The shape is defined and it holds while the tray waits: it has not slumped, spread, or relaxed back out of its form.
- Nothing is trapped that should not be: no air pocket where filling should be, no filling breaking through the surface, and no excess flour greying the outside.
- They finish together in the heat: no piece done while another is still raw, which is the only test that the first mark was met.
Where it goes wrong The dough was worked past its point or shaped without a rest, so it fought back: the pieces spring out of shape on the tray and bake tight, uneven, and torn along the surface.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Grüner Veltliner
- Also Right
- Vermentino or dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Saison
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus & herbs
The vegetable whisperers: peppery, high-acid whites that flatter greens, roots, and grains without bullying them.
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