50% Rye Rebuilt With Altus: Grinding Yesterday's Loaf Back Into Today's

At 85% hydration this stops being dough in the usual sense and becomes something you pour. The technique is almost entirely about restraint: five coil folds to build strength you cannot feel with your hands, then no shaping at all. Ciabatta is not shaped, it is cut — the dough is tipped onto a floured couche and divided with a bench scraper in three strokes.

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.