re: Making Artisanal Bread

This cast iron pizza recipe is fantastic and based on a focaccia crust. I highly recommend it!

LINK

Just mixed up a big recipe of the King Arthur rustic white. Y’all gonna make me fat...er.

Going visit the grandparents today so decided to make them some nice sourdoughs

Nice spring. Are you using 100% wheat flour or a blend? I usually use 10% whole wheat and 5% rye plus other flours. Tastes great but those other flours don’t spring like all wheat

24% AP flour and 76% bread flour

Page 89 of my edition of FWSY is the Overnight White Bread recipe. P 189 is a photo. A biga is just a starter, aka a preferment. Go find a recipe that calls for a biga and use your biga in that recipe.

Page 109 has a 50% whole wheat bread w biga recipe. You could also use it in the White bread with Poolish recipe on p 98.

Or, mix your biga with 500 g white flour, 250 g water, and 1/2 tsp instant yeast. Use your hand or a spoon. Get all the flour wet and biga mixed in. Let it rest for 30 mins then add 20 g salt. Squish the salt in using a pincer motion. Let it rest 39 mins, then do a stretch and fold 4x. Repeat the 30 min rest/stretch and fold 3 more times (over 2-3 hrs). Then shape into a rough round, put round into a bowl lined with a well floured non terry kitchen towel. Let it rest 1-2 hrs. Invert loaf onto parchment, place in a Dutch oven in a preheated 450 degree oven. Bake 30 mins, remove lid and bake 20 mins more. Cool completely before slicing.

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I'm new at this so I did half of the recipe. 400g. white flour, 100g. whole wheat flour, 390 g water, 1/8 tsp. dried yeast. After folding I let the dough rise overnight. What I get is a dough that is bubbling with gas and won't hold a shape. After reading a bit more what I have is BIGA , I think... What am I doing wrong??

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Did you skip the salt? It does more than just flavor the dough.
But this is a wet dough: 78% hydration. It is not going to be firm or hold its shape on its own. Hence the need to let it rise in a banneton or bowl or basket. It’s a high hydration dough that yields a holes, open crumb and distinctive crust. The wet dough generates lots of steam inside the closed baking vessel, which gives maximum oven spring.

No, the yeast swap wouldn’t matter.
Are you weighing everything? If not, it is easy to overshoot on the water and undershoot on the flour using volume measurement. If you are weighing, a simple error like forgetting to zero the scale after adding an ingredient can throw it all out of whack.

At this point, your mix is too old to be of any use. Toss and start again.

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Just mixed up a big recipe of the King Arthur rustic white. Y’all gonna make me fat...er.

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Their homemade bun recipe is rising now... I cooked these for the first time last week. Pretty amazon. Mixing the dough in the bread machine and then I will be putting it in bun pans in about 30 mins.