Sourdough ciabatta help!

Hello fellow TFL’ers!

This is my first post (although I have been using TFL for over a year now - it really is such an invaluable resource and has really helped me on my baking journey so far :) )

I have been baking with sourdough for over a year now and have recently started to branch out trying different flavours and types of bread.

Today I made a sourdough ciabatta and although I was pleased with the oven spring and crust, the inside was gummy and the crumb was only open/holey at the top of the bread- cue an afternoon spent analysing why this may have happened! So I thought, where best to turn but TFL :) 

Would anyone be able to help me shed some light on how this might have happened? I have shared my formula below:

 Pre-ferment:

• 24g of 100% hydration sourdough starter
• 118g organic Italian white ciabatta flour from Shipton Mill (they don’t specify what type of four this is but it is specifically designed for ciabatta and to get those big holes!)
• 118g water

I mixed the pre-ferment and left at room temperature for around 4 hours (I normally would leave this for 8+ hours but it was warm in the kitchen during the day so it was starting to bubble and I also was limited for time)

Final dough:

• Preferment from above
• 472g of Italian white ciabatta flour
• 382g water
• 12g salt
• 10g brown sugar

Total flour weight overall was 590g (or 602g including the four contributed by the starter) giving a hydration of 85%.

I mixed the pre-ferment with the final dough ingredients except the salt and allowed to autolyse for 1 hour. I then added the salt and did stretch and folds every 30 minutes for 3 hours. I then left at room temperature to bulk ferment for around  9/10 hours.

The dough did rise although the temperature has been pretty low overnight (around 14 degrees celsius). 

I carefully turned the dough out onto a well floured surface (given the high wetness of the dough) and used a dough scraper to half the dough into two pieces then gently fold the top half into the middle then the bottom half over the top of this then used my fingers to seal/shape the dough being careful not to let any of the gas escape. I then quickly moved these onto some baking parchment (too much flour got into the middle of the dough - lesson learned for next time!)

So far so good…they were both looking great and I left them to proof for 1.5 hours. Meanwhile I heated the oven with baking stone inside to 240 degreed celsius. 

I transferred them to the oven (one transferred nicely, the other was so sticky that I ended up misshaping it quite a bit). 

This first one had really good oven spring, the second one was pretty flat but i think this was due to misshaping that happened when i transferred it to the baking stone. 

When I cut the one with the good oven spring open, the holes were just at the top of the ciabatta whereas the bottom half was quite dense and gummy (see pics below). The base was also not as crispy as I’m used to - I think this was because the dough was too wet to remove from the baking parchment so I just had to transfer the dough straight to the baking stone (so still on the parchment). I was really pleased with the crust though.

I don’t normally bulk ferment for this long but I have seen some beautiful ciabattas being made with a similar method of long bulk fermentation and short final proof at room temperature. 

Was it the bulk ferment? Should I have used the flip method when transferring onto the baking stone? Or are there just too many variables to put it down to one thing…

Any advice on why this may have happened would be much appreciated. 

Thanks in advance TFL’ers!

Natalie 

Misshapen one on the left hand side - the dough was so sticky that it attached to the dough scraper and this ruined its shape :( oh I also decided to score this one. I know it's not traditional but I do love to score! 

Note to self - don't go as crazy with the flour when shaping next time as too much ended up inside!  

 Holy moley! A black hole leading to more gumminess...