Week 3: Hydration and the open crumb
What changes between a 65% dough and a 78% one, why folding replaces kneading, and where the holes in a ciabatta actually come from
8 March 2027
Last week ended with an instruction to shape decisively. This week that instruction stops working. Take the baguette from 70% up to 78% and the dough will not take a seam, will not hold a boule, and will not survive being handled the way a baguette wants to be handled. Almost everything about ciabatta follows from that one change.
What water does#
At 65%, week 1’s dough, the gluten network is concentrated enough to behave like a solid: push it and it pushes back, shape it and it stays. At 78% the same network exists but is spread through a fifth more water, so it behaves like a very slow liquid. It flows to fill whatever it is in, and left alone on a bench it spreads. Gliadin’s extensibility dominates and glutenin’s elasticity has less to work with, so the dough stretches a long way and snaps back weakly.
That slackness is not a defect to be corrected. It is the condition for the crumb. Bubble walls made of dilute, extensible gluten can be blown out thin and wide without tearing; the same gas in a 65% dough produces the small even cells you baked in week 1. You cannot get a ciabatta crumb out of a stiff dough at any fermentation length.
Strength in stages#
Kneading a 78% dough by hand does almost nothing useful. There is no resistance to work against, and twenty minutes of slapping produces a tired baker and a dough that is still soup.
Folding works instead because it is intermittent. A coil fold takes about ten seconds and stretches the whole mass in two directions at once, aligning the gluten strands that fermentation and hydration have been forming on their own in the intervening half hour. A stretch-and-fold gets to the same place by pulling: lift one edge, stretch it up and over the centre, turn the tub, repeat. It works, but each pull drags across the surface and presses the fold flat, where a coil lets the dough fold under its own weight. The coil costs less gas, so the coil is the one we use. Four folds at thirty-minute intervals give you a dough you can lift in one piece. The interval is doing as much work as the fold — you are letting the network build itself and then organising it, rather than forcing it.
Folds also leave the gas alone, which matters more here than in any dough so far. Kneading a risen dough degasses it by design. Folding a risen dough traps fresh air at the seams and leaves the existing bubbles intact, which is why folded doughs get visibly puffier over the bulk while stiffer doughs mostly get stronger.
The preferment sits underneath all of this. A poolish at 100% hydration is already at the dough’s own water level, so it dissolves in without fighting; a biga at 50% is stiffer, ferments more slowly and acidifies differently, and Italian bakeries use it for exactly that reason. Either way roughly 40% of the flour arrives already fermented, which buys flavour and some organic acid without adding hours to the day.
Everything is decided at shaping#
Two and a half hours of bulk fermentation produces a tub full of gas. Shaping is the twenty seconds in which you either keep it or throw it away.
So: flour the bench heavily, tip the dough out rather than pulling it, cut straight down with a bench knife, and move the pieces with your hands flat underneath. Wet hands where you must touch it, dry flour where the dough must not stick. No punching down, no pre-shape, no rounding, no seam. The rectangles are rectangles because that is the shape the dough is already in. Dimpling is the second and last pressure the dough gets: fingertips only, on a piece domed high enough that it would bake unevenly.
Three failures cover most of what goes wrong:
- The puddle. No folds, or folds too late. The dough never developed enough strength to hold its own height, so it spreads to 15 mm on the couche and bakes flat. Water without structure is not hydration, it is soup.
- The tight crumb. The dough was strong enough, and then someone degassed it at shaping — pressed it out, folded it, rounded it. The holes were there an hour earlier. Handling removed them.
- The gummy centre. The loaf came out at 90 °C. The crust is coloured and the outer crumb is fine, but starch does not all gelatinise at one temperature. A crumb holds less water than the starch wants, so the process that began around 60 °C is still finishing at 90 °C, and the middle has neither set nor driven off the water it is carrying. Bake to 98 °C, then cool for forty minutes, because a correctly baked ciabatta cut hot smears anyway.
Outline#
- 65% to 78% across three weeks: extensibility up, elasticity down, dough flows instead of holding
- why kneading fails on a wet dough and intermittent folding does not
- coil folds against stretch-and-folds — strength in stages, gas left alone
- poolish at 100% against biga at 50%: flavour, acidity, and 40% of the flour pre-fermented
- wet hands, floured bench, and where each belongs
- cut and dimple: the only two pressures the dough is allowed
- the puddle, the tight crumb and the gummy centre
Teaching team
- Idris Fenn — tutor