With all of the discussion around biga on thefreshloaf lately, I thought I'd owe it to myself to faithfully make Abel's 90% biga bread which has become one of those famous recipes here. This time I tried to make it exactly as per the recipe. In the last month I've tried Rene's idea of a 50% biga with sourdough, and I've also tried a similar idea of a long 24 hour fermented biga made with sourdough at 90% biga.
For me, the promise of the biga method is the extra smell and flavour from the biga, and maybe also that dough handling is better because you seem to be granted an extra special window of time where fermentation has advanced quite a bit, but gluten development has been minimal or at least fundamentally different enough that you can still develop a strong gluten. That is, provided you are working from 'strands' of 'just mixed enough' biga!
One of the things that has kept me away from Abel's method was the requirement for keeping the biga at 14-16°C, especially since I don't have a wine cellar or own a wine fridge. However, I seem to have figured out a good enough method here - I used my proofer switched off, which is essentially a polystyrene box, to which I added an additional bowl with 2 ice bricks and ice to keep things cool.
The biga was initially mixed using the famous method of two chopsticks just until there were strands or threads of dough, perhaps I was a little too much on the minimalist side because I did leave more unmixed flour at the bottom of the bowl than I would have liked. The initial dough temperature after mixing was 22
°C (room temperature water), which went down slowly overnight and at the end of the 15 hours before use it had reached 13.7
°C.
This bake was done with
instant yeast and the flours used were 90%
Caputo Manitoba Oro and 10%
Lowerland wholewheat. 1kg of the two flours were mixed together, and then 900g of that was used for the biga and 100g was reserved for the final dough. Mixing of the final dough was done similarly to how Alan and Lance recommended on the original post by Abel - I used the paddle and added small large coin sized chunks of biga gradually to a slurry made of two-thirds of the final water and flour. It was mixed for about 20 minutes whilst slowly adding the chunks of biga and small amounts of the hold-back water at a time, then the salt was added and gave it a further 8 minutes or so. I stopped with the mixer when the dough kept on climbing over the top of the paddle, even though there were still a few small bits of the biga in the final dough that weren't incorporated fully. Temperature after mixing was 23
°C.
Although I was concerned about the small bits of biga that made it through into the dough, it wasn't a problem for the final bread which had no lumps.
The bread had one coil fold during the 1 hour spent in a warm proofer (28
°C), then was split and pre-shaped and rested on the counter at room temp for 30 minutes, after final shaping and transfer to bannetons it was again kept at 28
°C for 1hr 15m before directly baking. The dough handled very nicely, it felt a little loose but was easy to shape and score.
As others have said, oven spring was amazing. And I love it when a loaf crackles after coming out of the oven, as these did.
The final flavour was lovely, subtle, much sweeter than sourdough and the salt came through well when eating. Lovely crispy crust. The crumb was more open than I have had with my previous biga bakes made with sourdough.
What a lovely bread, all in all. I am curious to one day try with lievito madre to see if I can copy what
Lance did in that regard, but I'm even more curious if it is possible to get a nice flavour using a raisin yeast water. And the IDY one is just such a winner already that all that seems unnecessary.
