Week 3 Bake: Wet dough on the bench

The week 3 bench session — a 78% ciabatta built from poolish, folded rather than kneaded, and handled so the gas survives the trip to the oven

8 March 2027

Ciabatta is the first dough this semester that will not do what your hands tell it. Water is the reason, and the whole session is about working with that instead of against it.

Before the session#

Mix the poolish 12 to 16 hours before you come in: 200 g bread flour, 200 g water at 20 °C, and 0.2 g instant yeast — the same 0.1% as last week. Cover it and leave it on a bench out of the sun. Look for what you looked for then: domed, webbed with bubbles, cream and cider. The dome just beginning to dip in the centre is the last usable moment rather than a fault. A solvent, nail-polish smell means it went too warm or ran too long, and you should mix a fresh one against a shorter, cooler clock.

Bring it in the tub you mixed it in. Bring a plastic scraper as well — at this hydration the scraper moves dough and your fingers only relocate it.

Read the week 3 lecture first, so the fold schedule makes sense while you are doing it rather than afterwards.

In the session#

Four hours, and the twenty seconds that decide the loaf are the ones where you tip the tub out.

Mix at the start: your poolish, plus 300 g flour, 190 g water and 2 g yeast. That is 500 g of flour and 390 g of water, so 78% hydration, against 70% last week, and it will look wrong — shaggy, soupy, nothing you could pick up. Rest it twenty minutes, then add 10 g of salt, 2%, and squeeze it through. Total yeast across the poolish and the mix comes to 2.2 g, or 0.44%.

Bulk ferments for two and a half hours at 26 °C. That is two degrees above week 1, because the folds need four thirty-minute intervals to sit in, and 26 °C is what gets a dough fully fermented in the two and a half hours that leaves. Coil fold every thirty minutes for the first two hours: wet your hands, lift the dough from the middle, let the ends fall under themselves, turn the tub ninety degrees, repeat. The first fold will feel like picking up a jellyfish. By the fourth the dough will lift in one piece and hold a domed edge for a few seconds before it relaxes. That change is the whole point: four gentle folds build more usable strength in a wet dough than ten minutes of kneading, and they do it without knocking out the gas.

Then flour the bench heavily and tip the tub out. Do not press, do not fold, do not knock it back. Flour the top, cut four rectangles straight down with the bench knife, and move each one to a floured couche with your hands under it. Dimple only where a piece is domed enough to bake unevenly. Rest thirty to forty-five minutes.

Bake at 250 °C with steam for the first ten minutes, then vent and drop to 230 °C until the crust is properly dark and the centre reads 98 °C — usually twenty to twenty-five minutes all up. Pulling at 90 °C gives a loaf that looks finished and is gummy two centimetres in from the crust. Cool for forty minutes before you cut. A fully baked ciabatta cut hot still smears.

Idris will be working the same timeline at the front bench, so if your dough looks nothing like his at the fourth fold, say so then rather than at the oven.

Afterwards#

Cut one loaf across the middle and photograph the crumb flat against a plain background in daylight. Write two sentences under it: what the hole structure says about your folds, and the one thing you would change. Bring both to week 4.

That photograph is the form of evidence bake-off 1 asks for, so it is worth taking properly now while the loaf is in front of you.