Sourdough Ciabatta

Hello HTS Community

I know the sense of accomplishment when you have a perfectly baked sourdough bread out of oven. And why not, you have put your hardwork into keeping the starter alive, shown absolute amounts of patience in folding and bulk fermentation, to enjoy a bread made from scratch. Life’s little pleasures.

I experimented with a few recipes and kept making adjustments with time, to come up with this easy one. The resulting bread is light and chewy, with a thin yet crisp crust, perfect for sandwiches and dunking in soup. There is going to be NO PREFERMENT and NO AUTOLYSE to make this ciabatta bread.

To add more to the list, there is no shaping, scoring, and making the dough in a ball. After the bulk fermentation and refrigeration time, simply divide the dough in 4 equal pieces on a floured surface, let them rest for an hour and they are ready to be baked. You can even make 2 decent sized baguettes with this recipe.

I have been baking with sourdough starter for months now, and you can try making sourdough pizza and bread loaf with it.

Ingredients you will need

• Good bread flour- 225g or 1½ cups 
• Water- 185 gm
• Active sourdough starter– 50g or about 1/4 cup
• Sea Salt- 6g or 3/4 teaspoon
• Olive oil- 1 tablespoon (to prevent dough from drying)

Steps:

The Dough

• To start, you should have active starter. Mix water and starter in a large mixing bowl, add salt and flour to form a dough. I know the dough will be sticky, so use a spatula to bring this thing together, and use hands only if needed. Cover with a kitchen towel for 30 minutes.

Folding & Resting

• With your wet fingers, grab one end of the dough and stretch as much as you can before it starts to break, and fold over the center. Rotate the bowl, and perform similar action until the entire dough has been stretched.
• Perform 4 sets of stretch and folds spaced out by 30 minutes, place the dough back in the warm area to rest.

Bulk Fermentation

• Grease a straight sided container with olive oil, and transfer the dough into it. On the outside of the container, mark the level of dough, so that later you can see how much the volume has increased. Rub olive oil on the top of the dough to prevent the skin from drying. Cover with a kitchen towel.
• Let the wild yeast work it’s magic for about 4-5 hours, or until the dough volume has nearly doubled. It took me about 5 hours because of the cold temperature. For hotter temperatures, it can take about 3 hours.
• After the volume increase, cover the container with a lid and transfer it to a refrigerator for 12-18 hours.

Shaping and Baking

• Remove the container from refrigerator, sprinkle top of the dough and work surface with plenty of flour. Take out the dough and pat it to make a rough rectangle. Sprinkle top of the dough with flour and divide in 4 equal small rectangles.
• Line a baking tray with parchment paper, and with floured hands, transfer each dough piece to the pan, gently pulling outwards. Cover the tray with a kitchen towel and set aside for 1 hour.

• Preheat oven to 250 degree Celsius for 10 minutes and transfer baking tray to the oven. Bake at 250 degree Celsius for 10 minutes, then reduce temperature to 230 degree Celsius, turn the tray and bake for another 10 minutes.
• Transfer them on a cooling rack, and enjoy after 1 hour. I turned mine into a sandwich, with grilled zucchini, tomatoes, fresh pesto, feta cheese, arugula and lettuce.