Scott Megee News Today

Here is another ciabatta experiment I made yesterday. I have been seeking a slightly more complex flavor than ciabatti made with yeasted preferments only, but not as sour as in a typical sourdough-only formula. Thus, I made both a biga and a levain for this dough. Both were stiff at 60% hydration, both had 20% prefermented flour, so the total prefermented flour in the recipe was 40%. I added an additional 0.3% instant yeast when mixing the final dough. This time I also included 3% olive oil in ...

alfanso Two words I had never thought of stringing together before yesterday.   But just for the fun of it I hand mixed the Bouabsa dough at its normal 75% hydration with its quite low iDY at 0.16%.  Modifying the remainder of the method, the dough was BFed for ~100 minutes with "ciabatta-like" folds in the vessel at 30 60 & 90 minutes.  Then off to retard for ~20 hours. Today the dough was pulled from retard and allowed to warm up for ~100 minutes.  Treating the dough as I would for ciaba...

alfanso 80% PFF ciabatta "Ciabatta are like geodes, their true beauty is hidden until you slice them.".  Don, our superb baker MTloaf, provided this wise comment recently.   Lately Ive been on a ciabatta reign of baking terror, starting last month with the Kingdom Bakery version a pair of times.  Then returned to my levain version of Scott MeGees ciabatta.  Most recently moved back to my biga version of same.  With 40% PFF at 66% hydration, Ive had good results with these. However, tinke...