Spiked Sourdough Ciabatta

Ciabatta!

My second grade teacher, who was a great influence in my life well past second grade, is moving away to be closer to her kids. I have not seen her in some years, but Servia has kept in touch with her. I wanted to go see her and bring a loaf of bread as a gift so we could all have a parting snack. I wanted to make a sourdough, but something that was not overly sour (as I do not know her tastes very well) and I wanted to make sure it was fresh. I didn't have the full three days to make Tartine Bread, so I decided to make Norwich Sourdough. Unfortunately I left my "elaborating" sourdough starter out on the counter all day until Servia reminded me about it at about 11pm. At that point, it was going to take to long to make the sourdough. Instead, I doctored the Sourdough Pizza Dough recipe to make it into ciabatta. Here was my process:

Ingredients:
Sourdough Starter

• 100g mature sourdough starter
• 65g bread flour
• 65 water

Final Dough

• 500g bread flour
• 15g whole wheat flour
• 400g warm water (95 degrees F)
• 14g salt (2 tsp)
• 1/4 tsp dry active yeast
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

Directions
Day 1:

• Make the sourdough starter. Let it sit for 4-12 hours.
• Mix together the sourdough starter with the water, salt, and yeast.
• Then mix in the flour until you have a smooth-ish mass. Let sit for 5 minutes.
• Drizzle the olive oil over the dough and kneed the oil into the dough for about 2 minutes.
• In the bowl or on a lightly oiled surface, use the Peter Reinhart stretch-and-fold technique: do 2 stretch and folds, wait ten minutes and repeat, wait ten minutes and repeat, and wait ten minutes and repeat.
• Cover the dough with plastic wrap (or similar) and place it in the refrigerator overnight.

Day 2:

• Take the dough out and place it at room temperature (70-75 degrees) for 2 hours (about 4.5 hours before baking)
• After the two hours, turn the dough out onto a floured surface. Gently make the dough into a rectangle and fold it in half.
• Cut that in half and separate the two pieces of dough.
• Fold each of the two pieces and fold the dough in thirds like a letter. Turn the dough seem side down onto a piece of floured parchment paper.
• Let the dough rise for 2.5 hours. If the dough pieces seem to small to you, after one hour gently stretch the dough into slightly larger rectangles.
• 30 minutes before baking, heat the oven and your steaming mechanism of choice to 500 degrees.
• When ready to bake, slide the dough, parchment and all, into the oven and bake under steam for 15 minutes. 
• Turn the dough around and bake for another 10-12 minutes, or until the bread is 210 degrees F. It should feel hard on top and be extremely light weight.

I spiked the dough with bakers yeast in order to prevent it from becoming too sour. If you want more sour ciabatta, leave out the bakers yeast and maybe tack on another half hour to the final rise (that is a guess).

My pictures were not particularly artful, but both the crumb and the flavor of the bread was wonderful. An easy, lovely, new ciabatta.