Dobie'a Challenge, Black Lager, 3 Starter, Sprouted 11 Grain, Sorta Ciabatta Rolls with Wheat Sprouts in a Baked Scald

I should have figured that once Lucy found out that I wanted to try out dobie’s no baking equipment except an oven, bowl and hands, she would try to make my life miserable with this weeks bread recipe – 11 grain sprouted ciabatta rolls, with wheat sprouts in the baked scald,

Normally the water content of ciabatta is critical and developing the gluten in a mixer is almost a must…..so with mo scale, mixer, dough scraper or even a spoon this was a challenge to say the least.

I would love to tell you the recipe since these came out so well but alas, I have no idea what it really was and just a faint hint of what it was supposed to be since the recipe Lucy gave me to follow was on my new computer and it blew up – probably because it found out that no technology was allowed!

The 11 sprouted grain flour was supposed to be 25% of the mix with the rest LaFama AP.  10 of the 11 sprouted grains were the same as last week’s bake with the addition of buckwheat which I picked up to make soba noodles,  The sprouted wheat berries in the 3 hour, baked scald were supposed to be 12.5% with 30 g each of the dough flour and water mixed in as well.

The hydration was supposed to be 90% overall with the Witch Yeast, Cook Potato and Rye SD combo starters at 15 g total coming in at 15% pre-fermented flour and 100% hydration.  We fed the 11 sprouted grain bran to the levain for the first of 3 feedings with the other (2) 4 hour feedings being the 80% or so extraction.  The dough liquid was easy at 12 fl oz of Shiner’s Black Lager and it was used for the 2 hour autolyse with the dough flour and the salt sprinkled on top.

That is about all I can remember and, true to Lucy’ form, most of this stuff isn’t supposed to even be in ciabatta but that never stops a wild child let loose on a poor, unsuspecting and nearly defenseless world.  Jeeze what a mess!  Might as well not have even mixed it all together but, when you are older, you can easily forget how much your baking apprentice hates you much less remember where you live. 

Scald before the scald

After a couple of minutes of slap and folds we cleaned off out fingers as best we could, covered the glop with the bowl and hoped the somewhere around the 20- 30 minute wait to the next set would help this soupy mess – no clocks allowed either.  It did firm up  a bit but it was way easy to fling onto the floor and ceiling both. 

Lucy cleaned up the floor and the stuff on the ceiling will eventually dry out, turn to dust and fall off over the net 200 years.  After 4 sets it has firmed up enough to do 3 sets of stretch and folds.   We have no idea how much bench flour we used but it was about a handful a couple of times all total.

We had planned to make (8) 135 g personal ciabatta buns after looking at Lucy’s recipe.  We have no idea how big these bins ended up but there were 8 of them when we finished wet hand shaping – if you could call it that.   We divided these into eight pieces by grabbing a hunk of dough and plopping it onto a floured parchment lined baking sheet 

After messing with them to get them half decent looking and sprinkling some flour on top so the plastic bag it was wrapped in wouldn’t stick,  we bagged them and chucked them in the fridge overnight.  We were shooting for an 18 hour retard but it was at least 16 hours I’m guessing.

After taking them out of the fridge to warm up and take a peek, we had some breakfast, read the paper, had a couple of cups of coffee before watering the lettuce garden and trying to get the new laptop fired up to check the market…… only to find out the curser wasn’t working making the laptop totally worthless. 

After firing up the old backup and getting some work done we decided to fire up the oven and bake these little, bunnish beauties up.  I would guess they were out of the fridge 2-3 hours before the oven was lit.  We set her for 450 F and when Big Old Betsy beeped we waited a bit before putting the Mega Steam on the bottom rack so that the stones could catch up to BOB. 

A few minutes later, when we could see steam billowing out of Betsy’s vent, we loaded the sheet on the bottom stone while turning the oven down to 425 F.  We looked through the glass door to see them puff up nicely.  Once we thought the spring hand sprung, we took out the Mega Steam and turned the oven down to 425 F convection. 

After a few minutes we rotated the sheet and let them bake until they looked a bit brown and tapped hallow on the bottom.  Normally we would bake them for 8 minutes with steam and 10 without but we guessed as best we could since timing anything was verboten as Lucy likes to say often enough.

These little slippers had an open crumb, tasted terrific and were wonderfully sour.  I would love to show some photos, but keeping with the spirit of dobie’s challenge – Lucy said no to the camera being used…..sad too since there were about the best little rolls ever!  You will just have to take my word on it.

Yea!  Lucy changed her mind when I told her I couldn't use a food taster for these rolls either so the camera came out and she wanted to make sure i put last nights sunset in the post.

 Here is the recipe Lucy gave me.

 Don't forget to top off the finished baked scald to the original 90 g with some extra water when done.