0 a thick mixture of flour, yeast (= a type of fungus that makes bread swell and become light), and water that is allowed to ferment (= go through a chemical change that causes it to produce bubbles) and then added to dough (= mixture) for making bread, especially Italian bread: --
I am a decent bread baker and am accustomed to using starters such as bigas and poolishes which develop a wonderful tasting product.
Where one baker uses a poolish starter, another uses a biga pre-ferment, and yet another uses neither.
After mixing the ciabatta ingredients into the risen biga, the dough will be much stickier and more moist than other bread doughs.
Most yeasted pre-ferments fall into one of three categories: "poolish" or "pouliche", a loose-textured mixture composed of roughly equal amounts of flour and water; "biga", a stiff mixture with a higher proportion of flour; and "pâte fermentée", which is simply a portion of dough reserved from a previous batch.
Let the biga rise overnight at room temperature and then use it.
The biga requires at least 12 hours to rise, and the bread dough must rise twice.