85% Hydration Ciabatta: Five Coil Folds and Then Keeping Your Hands Off It

Cracker thickness is the whole recipe. At 3 mm you get something chewy and bread-like; at 2 mm it shatters; at 1 mm it burns before it crisps. Two millimetres, rolled between two sheets of parchment, is the number that works in a home oven, and it is worth measuring with a ruler the first few times instead of guessing.

Ten minutes of dry pan time changes this loaf more than any change of starter or schedule I have tried. Toasting 35% of the total flour — the whole wheat part — before it ever meets water drives off the raw, slightly grassy note and replaces it with something between toasted bread and coffee. The catch is that toasted flour absorbs more water and develops less gluten, so the recipe has to be adjusted in two places.

This is the reference entry the rest of the ledger points back to. The 1:5:5 refresh — 20 g starter, 100 g flour, 100 g water at 24 °C — is not the only way to keep a starter, but it is the one with the widest usable window, and most baking failures I have written down start with a starter that was used at the wrong hour.