Ciabaguette

Makes 6 loaves

Ingredients

  • 765 g bread flour (100%)
  • 16 g salt (2%)
  • 5 g instant yeast (0.7%)
  • 610 g cool water (79.6%)

Mix all ingredients for 3-5 minutes. Wait 10 minutes. Fold the dough. Wait 10 minutes. Fold again. Since I can only fit 3 loaves on my baking stone, I like to separate the dough in half before the last fold. Wait 10 minutes. Fold again. (If you decided to up the hydration, wait 10 more minutes and fold again).

Let the dough rest in the fridge overnight (about 12 hours).

Let the dough get to room temperature again and rise until roughly doubled (again, since I can only bake 3 loaves at a time, I’ll take the second half of the dough out of the fridge roughly 30 minutes after the first).

Turn the oven on to 525 F, and let the pizza stone preheat (if you don’t have a pizza stone, you can use a sheet pan). Make sure to have a metal pan (that you don’t care too much about…) in the oven as well, you’ll use that to throw water in to create steam. Once the oven is ready, divide the first half of the dough into three loaves: I just flop it on a generously floured bench, make it approximately rectangular, and divide in 3 with a bench scraper. Score as your heart desires, and put them in the oven. I use a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, and just slide the parchment paper onto the pizza stone in the oven.

Immediately pour 1/2-1 caup of water in the preheated metal pan that should already be in the oven, and at 30 seconds intervals mist the oven with water three times (I use a tiny spray bottle). Lower the temperature to 475 F. Cook for 20-24 minutes until the bread is golden brown or it reaches 205 F in the middle. Crank the oven to 525 F again, let everything warm up and thermalize and repeat with the second half of the dough.

References

This is pretty much lifted from the Pain à l’Ancienne recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, pp 199-202.

Note

This works pretty well with hydrations up to 84%, and is pretty delicious with an 80/20 mix of bread and whole wheat flour. The misting is probably overkill.

Section author: Carlo