This bread is easy to make, but requires a minute or two’s attention every half hour for 3 hours. If you have a good mixer, it may be easier to make the dough in it and leave it to rise and prove as normal, but if you don’t, this method certainly saves a lot of sticky messing about!

Ingredients

600 g Organic strong white bread flour (see note below)
480 g Lukewarm water (80%)
10 g Instant yeast (1.66%)
10 g Salt (1.66%)

The figures in brackets are baker’s percentages – percentages of the flour that enable the recipe to be scaled for any amount of flour.

Method

Mix the flour and salt together, then mix in the yeast. Add the water, which should be lukewarm (about 40°C, 105°F). Mix together to a ‘shaggy’ dough. I use a tablespoon and a teaspoon for this – the tablespoon to mix and the teaspoon to scrape the dough off the tablespoon.

Once mixed, you can leave it in the bowl if you like, but I prefer to scrape it into an oblong plastic container about the size of a Swiss roll tin. Cover it; I use a damp muslin cloth – you can use a plastic bag or cling film (plastic wrap) if you wish, but bear in mind that you’ll need to uncover and cover it 3 or 4 more times.

I set a timer for 30 minutes and when the time is up, wet my hands and fold the left side of the dough over to the right side, then the top over to the bottom, the right to the left, and the bottom to the top. I then do these folds again. By this time, you should have a cohesive dough.

Wet hands are the secret to easy management of this dough!

Do this twice more, leaving 30 minutes between and with just 1 set of 4 folds each time.

You should see the dough getting larger. This is before and after 1½ hours:

After 2 hours, the dough can be cut and shaped into ciabatta or rolls or, as in this case, tipped into a well-oiled 20x20cm (8″x8″) tin to make things really easy. Cover and leave to rise for another half hour, taking care that the cover doesn’t touch the dough.

Pre-heat your oven to 220°C, 425°F, gas mark 7(Fan – 200°C, 400°F, gas mark 6).

After 30 minutes or so the dough should be well risen; put the tin into the pre-heated oven and cook it for 15 minutes, then reduce the heat to 180°C, 350°C, gas mark 4 and cook it for a further 20 minutes.

This is the bread; I wasn’t too happy with it. It was denser than normal. It’s OK for toast, but…

… the following day I tested the yeast with both tap and bottled water; it was working fine. I added flour to both; they still seemed to work fine. So I put both tests together and continued with the recipe above – as you can see, the loaf, albeit thinner because I made less dough, is a lot more open-textured.

In hindsight, I think I may have weighed the yeast incorrectly. I’ve made this recipe using the method above on numerous occasions. I have noticed that the organic flours that I’ve used so far don’t create as large holes as the non-organic pizza flour that I used previously, but their protein levels are lower so gluten development won’t be as good. However, I’ve always had results like the bread in the last photo which I’m very happy with – big holes let any topping drip through aanyway!

Other yeasted recipes that you may be interested in:

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