Every couple weeks or so, we send out a little roundup of new recipes, techniques, and tutorials that we’ve recently posted on the site. Occasionally we announce exclusive giveaways to newsletter subscribers as well. We won’t spam you with ads or share or sell your email address. Every email we send has a 1-click unsubscribe link if you decide it’s not for you.
Sprouted Wheat Sourdough Ciabatta
Ciabatta is one of my favorite breads, and now I’ve hit upon a great combination of flavor, texture and nutrition by using sprouted hard red wheat berries that I mill in my Mockmill. Sprouted wheat is slightly sweeter than regular grains, which is a great balance to the sourdough starter in the recipe, and sprouting a grain makes more of the nutrients available [paywall] for digestion (more studies of sprouted grain nutrition available here). It can also increase fermentation activity in dough and slow down staling (though this ciabatta gets eaten in a few days, so I haven’t been able to fully test that theory).
[Jump to recipe]
In the past, I developed a ciabatta recipe with all bread flour (good flavor, great structure) and with all whole grain spelt flour (great flavor, less pockety crumb). This recipe is the best of both and more, because of the sprouted aspect of the whole grain wheat.
The techniques for developing the gluten, shaping the wet dough, and baking the ciabatta slippers are similar to my earlier ciabatta recipes: mixing by hand or a stand mixer, three rounds of stretching and folding, a preshape / shape by gently stretching the dough into a rectangle and then folding it over on itself, and finally baking on a preheated pizza stone, steel, or cookie sheet with a pan underneath for water at the start of the bake.
The first video below show the hand mixing technique that can be done instead of, or in addition to, using a stand mixer. The second video shows how to shape ciabatta with minimal degassing. The final ciabatta shapes are determined by how you stretch the dough after pouring it from the bowl. A stretched square folded in half will make for three long slippers and a stretched rectangle folded in half results in 4-5 large rolls.
Sprouted Wheat Sourdough Ciabatta
Ingredients
Baker's Percentages*
Instructions
Shopping List
Sprouted Wheat Sourdough Ciabatta