Italian Ciabatta is Airy, Crunchy, and Simple to Make

hey it's Martin I'm in the studio today with Tucker and we're making rustic Italian Ciabatta ciabatta is that slipper shaped loaf crusty exterior open crumb let's make it rustic Italian Ciabatta okay all good ciabatta begins with a pre-ferment and the most sort of revered famous classic pre-ferment to use with ciabatta and other Italian breads is a bigger biga b-i-g-a biga what is a bigger abiga is a yeasted stiff pre-ferment that means when I say stiff I mean like dough consistency and the purpose of it is just to create flavor we set the pre-ferment it rises overnight and it's basically like a bouillon cube of fermentation flavor it boosts flavor how do you make great ciabatta you start with a pre-ferment we're going to make a bigger this is how you do it I've got some water and it uses a very small amount of yeast so eighth teaspoon of yeast then the flour goes in and I'm using bread flour bread flour is really good in this for this bread and similar to the reasons that it's really good for something like Panda Cristal we have a lot of water and we need a nice strong dough environment to sort of hold the loaf up in spite of all that water so it's how we're going to produce that open crumb is by using bread flour and a lot of water okay so water yeast bread flour in the bowl and then I'm just going to stir to combine got everything Incorporated and that's it so there's our Biga done cover it leave it overnight okay so I'm gonna put my Vega into the bowl and then I'm going to add my water and I'm going to break it up a little bit so Vega into my mixing bowl so we're working in a studio by Nature it's cool in here in order to manage or guide good fermentation this water is 110 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit it's at the high end of what we normally use for does because I know that the flour is cool the big is cool the room is cool all of these factors so I'm warming the water to make sure that I come out with something that's in a reasonable range for good fermentation and once I have the water in then I'm just going to go in with my hands and just break up the Vega so you can see I've got this pretty well dispersed it's not perfect but it's good enough because we're going to mix it some more and next in the yeast a little bit of instant yeast and some salt and then the rest of my flour goes in and you can do this by hand or you can use a flexible scraper this is a slack dough it's not as slack as Panda Cristal if you've made that but it's pretty Slack because I'm mixing by hand I am going to go ahead and knead it a little bit but I'm not going to need it in the way that you might expect if I'm going to dump this out on the counter I'd have to add a lot of flour right it would be it would change the consistency of the dough just in order to to be able to work with it if you look at this it's like slop right it's like well someone messed up the bread so I'm going to show you how I'm going to knead this I say need it's not need in the classic sense really what I'm trying to do is doing is just giving it a little bit of agitation in the bowl foreign I kind of do it until my arm starts to bark it's like hey enough of that and I might give it a rest or go back and get some water take a break give this like another 10 20 seconds you know ciabatta ciabatta is like everything that I want in a baguette in terms of crusty open structure but honestly with a little bit more flavorful crumb and a lot less work you don't have to worry about scoring you don't have to worry about Delicate shaping um steaming is nice with ciabatta but not entirely necessary to me it kind of like delivers what you want from a baguette but with a lot less effort I think okay so see you in an hour when we're gonna fold this bye y'all handshake okay those had about an hour at that point you're not going to see a ton of activity right you're not going to see like giant bubbles or a significant sort of volumetric expansion of the dough but you will see some activity and when I look in here I see some bubbles starting to form and the does start sort of starting to inflate a little bit now I have something that's got almost like a rubbery quality we call that elasticity it also stretches pretty easily that's extensibility those are the two factors that gluten brings to the party that allows us to make great Shabbat great Panic Crystal great baguettes um brioche everything in the gluten kingdom is possible because of these two factors extensibility and elasticity one is that Snappy rubber band like quality the other one is the one that enables the dough to stretch easily okay but what I need to do is fold this and folding is going to reinforce that sort of network which is starting to form of strength and the way I'm going to do it is I'm going to reach to the outside of the bowl and just fold to the middle making my way around the dough as I do that with your hand and this is part of the reason to have your hand in the bowl right not a machine but actually use your hand is because when my hand goes in the bowl I can perceive that strengthening happening I can feel the tension build as I stretch and fold to the center doing this bowl fold so I'm just making my way around the bowl and you'll see that what began is this like sloppy Mass watch this will now hold itself together right this is a beautiful young dough and that's it I've done my bowl fold make sure the sides are clean I'll see you in about an hour for the Divide all right so I've got a bubbly happy ciabatti dough um it's been a little bit more than an hour since I folded it which like I said is fine don't fret wash the dough not the clock look in here and see does it look like a healthy fermentation uh it looks good to me it's got bubbles around the outside I can see that the dough is like marshmallowy I don't want this to stick to my work surface and so I'm going to do a couple things one is that I'm going to heavily flour this bench that I'm working on and I'm going to sort of heavily flour the top side of this dough pushing some flour sort of down the side of the bowl because I want this piece of dough to come out in one Fell Swoop okay so I feel like that's kind of released from the bowl and now I'm gonna just generously dust my work surface so now what I'm going to do is just gently massage it into that's a little bit of a rectangle it's a rectangular situation in order to keep my bench knife from sticking when I divide i flour the top surface as well right okay so I'm going to let it proof the final proof I'm going to let it actually sit right here on the bench covered okay but I need some flour down first and I want a super even coating of flour so I'm going to use my sifter to just lay down a really even situation here so it's a pretty heavy dusting but it's what I need to ensure that I don't stick to the bench during the proof and so I'm going to cut this like really evenly or as evenly as I can eyeball into two pieces like that hands like paddles as best you can just get under it pick it up and lay it down that's it what I like to do is massage it just briefly not massage it but just sort of stretch it into a perfect rectangle and then we're done okay so hands like paddles getting underneath there boom just lay it over here and you know try and make them about the same size one note while these are doing their final proof you do want to cover them so loosely with whatever you have I've got these nice plastic Lids that's a good option alternatively if you have um like a food safe can liner or something like that food safe trash bag you can Loosely drape that over and that will work as well you don't want them to dry out you want them to not dry out so just avoid that okay happy nappy okay so we're ready to load the ciabatta it's been a little bit over an hour and if I look at the surface of these loaves you can see that there is a lot of gas production it's going to be nice and open so what I want to do is dust the tops a little bit with a little bit of additional flour just to make sure that during transferring they don't stick to anything if they stick to anything it's going to impact the structure right it's going to sort of cause cause a little bit of like malformation so again working with hands like paddles I'm just going to roll this forward and then I'm going to gently lift it up and set it on my parchment lined sheet tray and then I'm going to do the other one again same thing hands as paddles trying to work as gently as possible I'm inverting them and then I'm moving them over okay so now those are ready to be loaded I'm going to slide them off this tray onto a baking stone which has been really well preheated it's a nice hot hot oven and then I'm going to add some water I have some cast iron pans in the bottom of the oven I'm going to add some water just to give this steam during the baking process it's going to help them rise a little bit more fully and it's going to sort of heighten that crispness of the crust [Music] foreign [Music] when I come from the oven is that that's good that generally means that like I'm happy right it's got good color the crust is firm and crisp I don't feel like I need to say anything else I mean that's kind of like what it's supposed to do right the gentle handling the high hydration the bread flour the good fermentation the hot oven the steam that's what good bread looks like or good ciabatta looks like that should just be the video is this like the sound of me eating this loaf hey so this is Martin and Tucker saying thanks for joining us to sort of follow along as we make this beautiful loaf of ciabatta if you haven't already click that like button and also take the time to subscribe because there's a lot more great content just like this and it's coming in hot so join us we'll be here bacon and hopefully I'm enjoying ourselves too

Channel: King Arthur Baking Company

Views: 425,153

Keywords: baking, king arthur flour, flour

Id: bRGHpCNl72o

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 03 2023