Richard Hart's "Real Italian Ciabatta" recipe

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Benbuck on 14 Sep 2025 at 10:20

In Richard Hart's Bread book he has a recipe for "Real Italian Ciabatta" that has a biga that contains 100% of the flour and  is 45% hydration. The additional water added later results in 75% total hydration. I have tried many different ciabatta recipes but even using an immersion blender and 8 minutes of medium speed in a KA mixer, nothing seems to get rid of the clumps from the dry biga. Any thoughts on getting a smooth dough without going to a higher hydration poolish?

Thanks,

I don't know what the recipe in that book is, but I have tried the actual original recipe by Cavallari.  We can't really duplicate it because he used a carefully chosen selection of five flours using local grains with a "special" milling process,  and I couldn't find any information on those flours.  The original uses a 50% hydration for the biga, close to your 45%.
As long as there are no dry flour bits, it's fine to leave the biga somewhat shreddy instead of being a smooth mass. It might even be better that way - we've had several threads on shreddy bigas. ReneR has been the foremost booster of them. Here's a thread mostly about them, also called shaggy bigas.  It's very long and very worth reading:

https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/68024/biga-controversy

Here is my post on TFL about making the original style ciabatta:

https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/74294/almost-original-recipe-ciabatta

TomP

Tom,

Thanks for your extensive comments and I enjoyed those links. I have done a SD ciabatta in the past with 20% inoculation that was good however a slightly different taste than the Biga recipe by Hart. My other results with the Hart recipe tasted great buy did have a few lumps. I may experiment with the strands verses vs one mass. I have used the one mass which I thought would help the four to absorb the water.

Benbuck

Can't remember who it was that suggested this, but seem to remember someone else tried it (Lin?) and reported it worked. If I remember well, the suggestion was to leave the biga to soak in the additional water and once it's become more fully hydrated to proceed to mixing up the final dough.

Otherwise I would proceed as sparkfan suggests, a little water at a time.

I also only mix by hand and have never had a big issue with incorporating the biga shreds. Doesn't need to be completely smooth either.

I'm pretty sure Lin made a descent ciabatta using this biga method.

…and I agree that the biga should be broken into smallish chunks and soaked in the additional water for at least 30 minutes before further mixing. After soaking the biga will smooth out. Have not done biga with 100% of the formula flour but since your starting at 45%, you’ll have 30-35% liquid for the soak.

Good luck,

Phil

Increasing the hydration by such a high amount is not an eays task. You need a good mixer and you have to proceed like bassinage. Mix the biga until you have a homogenous dough. Then add only very small amounts of water at a time and mix until incorporated. Continue until you reach the desired hydration. I’m not sure if the result is worth the effort.

An immersion blender is for sure not the tool of choise. Not sure which KA you have. With the Kenwood, depending on the flour and the hydration I would probably switch at some point from the dough hook to the K beater.

A good spiral mixer would probably perform better.

 

Sparkfan,

I would agree on the spiral mixer being a better tool. Most Italian bread makers have them. But for this one particular recipe I am not sure it would be worth the additional purchase. Most of my doughs are small batches which I would rather dough by hand anyway.

Thanks

Immersion blender is definitely not the way to go as it will destroy the gluten structure the biga method is supposed to strengthen. 

The main idea behind the shaggy biga compared to the single mass biga Is to preserve as much of the gluten as possible during a long fermentation by avoiding it's formation early on through minimal mechanical agitation and thus keeping more for the later stages of the fermentation. 

Chopping it up after all that effort with an immersion blender would defeat the purpose of the biga.

I lived in Italy for many years and this level of hydration 45-50%, is fairly standard for a  biga in many formulas. I went through this for a long time with an authentic Napoletan pizza formula I had. Finally it dawned on me that traditionally Italian flour was very weak. These days thats not so much the case, mills import what they refer to as  "Manitoba" flour which is not necesarily from Manitoba but is stronger flour to mix in with the Italian stuff. It comes mostly from Canada,  US, Austrailia or Eastern Europe. 

So to solve the problem I went to a huge supermarket and  bought a bag of the lowest protein content flour I could find in the local supermarket. It was also the cheapest, a no-name brand on the bottom shelf. It was 9% protein. I used that, just for the biga. Much easier to work with and the results were fanstastic.

 

I agree. The shaggy biga method works very well with weak flours. I started using it to make SD loaves with spelt and have been able to take the spelt content to 75% using it and still producing loaves with superb oven spring.

On Manitoba, I remember a pack of flour in the supermarket in Italy that had an Italian flag stamped on it with 'made with Italian grains' written under it!!

My observation is, that high protein flours from italian mills and maybe also other european mills are often called manitoba or tipo manitoba. It seems that manitoba is not a registered trade mark or so and everybody can use it for whatever they want.

 

Add water little by little until it smooths out and becomes elastic at this point you can add greater amounts of water.

Agreeing with others, a spiral mixer would make easy work of this.

My next attempt will be with a weak flour and I will post results here. Interesting that the recipe calls for strong bread flour in the biga.

Thanks to all.

If I am not mistaken, the comments from Susan relate to the way biga preferments, in general, help with the preservation of gluten, even if from weak flour, but was not necessarily suggesting that you use it for your bake. 

I would stick with the recipe you have, but maybe switch from a single-lump biga, to a shred/shaggy, biga (as per the links from Tom), into which you then incorporate the water little by little, as per the posts of sparkfan and mwilson. If there is a high-hydration for the ciabatta, you should stick to strong flour as suggested in the recipe because the weak flour will not be able to support the high hydration.      

I just realized, as I posted originally, the biga has 100% of the flour.

Biga       

F 100%

W 45%

Y 1%

Additions

W 30%

I'll ignore the salt and malt powder for this discussion.