I was looking through the Community Bake on ciabatta, and I didn’t see that anyone had tried using the original recipe of the inventor,\u00a0Arnaldo Cavallari.\u00a0 It’s available on line as a photo of the recipe (in Italian) in his bakery, and there is a faithful translation available, too (I know because I transcribed the recipe from the photo by hand, and translated it with Google Translate). I’ll post the links later.\u00a0 The recipe is very different from what us home bakers typically do, and also from most ciabatta recipes I have seen.Here’s a brief summary: 10kg flour, 50g brewer’s yeast, 5L water. Mix in spiral mixer 5 minutes. Ferment 16 – 22 hours at room temperature. Add 2L water, 100g sugar, 250g salt. Mix 5 minutes slow, 8 – 10 minutes medium, desired dough temperature 25 – 27 C (77 – 81 deg F). Bulk ferment 30 – 40 minutes. Scale into 300g pieces and shape onto floured boards.\u00a0 Proof 1 hour uncovered. Turn loaves over onto baking sheets, bake with steam “at a high temperature” for 30 – 35 minutes, releasing steam halfway through.Wow! 100% pre-fermented flour.\u00a0 50% hydration biga. 70% final hydration (modern recipes are usually 80 – 85%). Proof uncovered. So different.The hydration seems very low but we don’t know much about his flour mix.\u00a0 He said he worked it out with a selection of five local flours of different kinds, and came up with a milling method suitable for the bread – he owned his own production mill.\u00a0 So we don’t know anything about the ability of his flour mix to absorb water, nor what the effective extraction was.\u00a0 I was not able to find a picture of an original loaf nor its crumb so we don’t really know about that either.We do know that he was trying to produce an Italian competitor to the baguette for sandwiches, and that the bread is said to have had a thin hard crust and soft open interior.Well, I’m not about to make a batch with 10kg flour, and if I wanted to I couldn’t handle nor bake it.\u00a0 So it will have to be scaled down, in this case to 300g flour for experimenting.\u00a0 We know that larger batches of dough can behave differently, often needing less yeast and maintaining a higher temperature better.\u00a0 The oxygenation during fermentation will be different.\u00a0 Also, I’m not going to try to mix a 100% hydration biga with my old KitchenAide mixer.\u00a0 In fact, I planned to do the final mixing and kneading by hand too.So this effort won’t be 100% faithful to the original but I’ll try to come as close as reasonably possible.\u00a0 Here are my going-in decisions:1. Sourdough instead of yeast, so I don’t have to guess how much yeast will act the same.\u00a0 Maybe yeast in a later bake. I used 7% of starter.\u00a0 I thought this should give me a fairly long initial fermentation, maybe 12 hours.2. Flour mix: 80% KA Bread flour, 10% sifted stone-ground whole wheat, 10% durum flour.\u00a0 Maybe this will be something like the original, but who knows?\u00a0 At least it should taste good.3. After working in the last 20% (hydration) of water by hand, do several stretch-and-fold sessions to replace the machine mixing of the original.4. Let the dough ferment long enough to double or nearly so, instead of using the one hour specified in the original.\u00a0 There are just too many unknowns to justify setting a strict time limit.Everything went pretty smoothly.\u00a0 The first fermentation seemed to be done after 11 hours, a little quicker than I had in mind.\u00a0 Mixing in all that extra water by hand was tedious, and I let the dough rest several times to help it absorb all the water. Then I kneaded it in the bowl until all the layers had merged together.\u00a0 I did two sets of 20 coil folds 15 minutes apart. After that I thought the dough was in good shape and wouldn’t need any more.\u00a0 Overall the dough fermented for about 2 hours after the last S&F before it had doubled.The dough was light and airy, and easier to handle compared with typical 80 – 85% doughs I’ve made in the past, but it felt rather wetter than I expected for a 70% hydration dough. The final proof took an hour.\u00a0 The loaves baked with initial steam at 425 deg F for 27 minutes.Overall I found the process fairly easy except for working in all the extra water.\u00a0 Shaping and moving the loaves was easier than I expected.\u00a0 The finished loaves look like respectable ciabatta bread.\u00a0 The interior is soft but not as open as we have come to expect.\u00a0 The crust was thin and on the hard side but not too hard to bite through in a sandwich.\u00a0 The flavor is rich, with a little sourness as you would expect after the long ferment with sourdough.As a sandwich loaf, I used it for a chicken salad sandwich for lunch today and I thought it was very nearly the perfect sandwich loaf. I was able to slice the loaf lengthwise and leave a bit of a hinge on one side.\u00a0 The hinge had no tendency to break open.\u00a0 This helps squishy fillings to stay in place.\u00a0\u00a0What’s next?\u00a0 I want to try it again, using yeast for the biga.\u00a0 I’ll probably also repeat with sourdough, but less, maybe 4% instead of 7%.\u00a0 I’d love to see what someone else comes up with, trying the original recipe.\u00a0 This might be a very good place for a low-acid Levieto Madre starter, wouldn’t you think?Links :The English translation:\u00a0https:\/\/www.tasteatlas.com\/ciabatta\/recipeThe original recipe, in Italian –\u00a0https:\/\/www.tripluca.com\/paesi\/europa\/italia\/la-ciabatta\/TomP\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was looking through the Community Bake on ciabatta, and I didn’t see that anyone had tried using the original recipe of the inventor,\u00a0Arnaldo Cavallari.\u00a0 It’s available on line as a photo of the recipe (in Italian) in his bakery, and there is a faithful translation available, too (I know because I transcribed the recipe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":144,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-143","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-food"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}