Small mise-en-place for the home artisan baker
I've got a couple of books on artisan baking, and recipes are a snap to find - even better, formulas are easy to find. I converted all my baking (and a lot of my cooking recipes) to formulas starting about three years back. One thing I notice about a lot of the artisan formulas is the large amounts of flour they call for - 6-800g being the norm.
I'm more of a fresh loaf kind of guy - I needed to downsize. So I did some casting around and found a little hand mixer - the Cuisinart HM-50 - on-line for under $50, and a pair of Cuisinart dough hooks to go with it for another $8. I've never been an electric mixer user, but I have to say that this little combo is great. No way am I going to clean up after myself if using my wife's Cuisinart 5q - it's overkill on tiny loaves.
If you're like me you'd rather bake a single 200g loaf each day than eat three days of frozen loaves from an 800g outing. The dough hooks for this little mixer are the spiral variety (Ciril Hitz likes spiral). The low speed is plenty low enough for even these small loaves, especially if you're using preferment. So you can ignore the average review that says slow speed is too fast - not too fast for bread. And the mixer has plenty of power for my small loaves.
So my "new standard" ciabatta:
For the preferment:
100g KA Sir Lancelot (50%)
100g water (50%)
0.25(?)g yeast.
Mix by hand, place in a snap-lid plastic container overnight. Hefty makes a great series of little snap-lid containers in various shapes. You get them in the grocery store.
For the dough:
100g KASL (50%)
66g water (33%)
3g salt (1.5%)
0.5(?)g yeast
Mix on low speed for about 6 minutes, finish on speed 2 for 3 additional minutes. I've found that with the high hydration rate in ciabatta, good gluten development at the mixing stage is the best way to go.
I usually do 3-4 stretch-and-folds per Ciril Hitz, then simple shaping, being sure to turn the loaf over before it goes into the oven. I've also found that drenching the loaf with a spray bottle works better than any of the steaming techniques I've come across.
I can bake these little 200g loaves in the countertop convection oven in my basement kitchen. I heat the pizza stone on a burner instead of in the oven to get the "spring" I need when the bread goes into the oven.
That little Cuisinart mixer is a snap to clean up - the dough hooks pop out and soak clean in no time. Like I said, a nice setup for us "small-time" bakers -
I too just don't want or need to make multiple loaves of bread .. and trying to cut the formulas in half (or less) is a lesson in futility. so from all of us who want to make just one loaf (I'm single, so even one lasts me several days) I say thank you. but I've never seen or heard of KA Sir Lancelot ?? (I"m on the west coast) is it a bread flour or a/p ?
is King Arthur's highest-gluten flour. I've never seen it in a store, but you can order it from the KA site. You can sometimes find KA bread flour - not quite as high in gluten content, and probably close to Gold Medal Better for Bread. I used GMBfB until I found Sir Lancelot.
IME, the KA flours are very finely ground, so it's critical to use formulas. When I weighed a cup of KA All Purpose and a cup of GMBfB, the KA was 12g lighter.
to the small loaf formula. This was adapted from Ciril Hitz, whose formulas treat preferments and dough as separate entities. All my formulas include both preferment flour and water in the overall calculation.
Hitz's ciabatta formula tripped me up a little because the flour in the poolish is only about half the flour in dough. Since I make poolish with 100% hydration, when i copied Hitz's formula perentages, I inadvertantly added too much water to the final dough. The percentage of water in the dough phase should be 28%, not 33%. The extra water doesn't really hurt anything, but it makes the dough really sticky all the way through.
My bad.