How to Make Fresh Homemade Ciabatta Bread

This post will teach you how to make a crusty, open-crumbed loaf of ciabatta bread. Below you will find a detailed guide full of tips and tricks as well as a troubleshooting section to help you make a loaf of ciabatta bread with a crisp, golden exterior, and a light, airy crumb. Video guidance, too!

After posting this sourdough ciabatta bread recipe, I felt determined to make a comparable, yeast-leavened variation. In my research, I learned that ciabatta is often made with a poolish or biga, meaning a small amount of flour and water mixed with a leavening agent and left to ferment for a short period of time.

This got me thinking: could I replace the 100 grams of sourdough starter in the sourdough ciabatta recipe with 100 grams of poolish? I gave it a go, stirring together 50 grams each flour and water with 1/2 teaspoon instant yeast and then letting it sit for three hours. When the surface of the poolish was dimpled with holes, I proceeded with the recipe, adding water, salt, and flour; mixing the dough; stretching and folding it; letting it rise, and finally transferring it to the fridge overnight.

The following morning, I turned the dough out onto a floured work surface, cut it into eight portions, and transferred them to a sheet pan. One hour later, I baked them.

Friends! It worked beautifully. The crumb, while not quite as wild and amorphous as the sourdough version, was full of holes, giving the ciabatta its characteristic lightness and airiness. It quickly became one of my favorite homemade bread recipes, a perfect bread for beach lunches and mountain hikes, for dinner with friends and family, perhaps beside a fire or under twinkling bulbs strung from tree to tree, a pool of olive oil at the ready to dunk into at will.

PS: Another favorite bread recipe : Overnight Refrigerator Focaccia = The Best Focaccia

Ciabatta: A Quick Overview

• Traditional ciabatta is characterized by a slipper shape as well as an extremely porous and chewy texture. Originating from the Lake Como region of northern Italy, ciabatta means “slipper” in Italian.
• Ciabatta dough is wet and sticky with hydration levels often 80% or higher. Both the recipe below and this sourdough version are 82% hydration.
• Traditional ciabatta recipes call for very little yeast and a long, slow rise. Many recipes call for making a biga or poolish (as noted above), which helps produce that light, airy texture.
• Some ciabatta recipes call for milk or olive oil, but neither of these ingredients is required to make a traditional loaf of ciabatta.

Troubleshooting

If your dough does not cooperate the first time around, you may need to make some changes:

• Water: This is a very high-hydration dough, and depending on the flour you are using and your environment (if you live in a humid environment, for instance), you may need to reduce the amount of water. If, for example, when doing your stretches and folds, the dough never came together in a cohesive ball, I would reduce the water by 50 to 60 grams next time around.
• Flour: All flours absorb water differently. Through troubleshooting with people all over the world often with people making this sourdough pizza recipe, this yeast-leavened pizza recipe, and most recently this sourdough ciabatta recipe, the type of flour being used plays a critical role in how the dough turns out. Often the water needs to be reduced considerably for the dough to come together. If you live abroad or in Canada, you can either make the recipe once as written or add the water slowly, mixing as you do, until the dough resembles the dough in the video.
• Tunneling: A common problem with ciabatta is tunneling: large gaping holes running through a loaf of bread. If you end up baking a loaf of hollow ciabatta, try lengthening the final proof. Why? Because when under-proofed dough enters an oven, the remaining energy in the yeast leads to fast and furious gas production. This explosion of gas breaks the gluten structure of the bread, causing the tunnel to form.

How to Make Ciabatta Bread, Step by Step

The first step of the recipe calls for making the poolish. To do so, gather your ingredients: flour, water, and instant yeast. SAF is my preference.

Whisk together 50 grams flour and 1/2 teaspoon instant yeast.

Add 50 grams water.

Stir to combine. Cover the bowl and let sit for 3 to 4 hours or until…

… the surface of the dough is dimpled with air pockets.

Add 360 grams water. (This part is really fun … the poolish bubbles up as a unit and floats on top of the water… it really feels alive!)

Stir to combine; then add 12 grams salt and stir again to combine.

Add 450 grams flour, preferably bread flour.

Using a spatula, stir until you have a sticky dough ball. Cover and set aside for 30 minutes.

With wet hands, perform a set of stretches and folds, by grabbing one side of the dough, and pulling it up and to the center. Rotate the bowl a quarter turn, and repeat the grabbing and pulling. Do this until you’ve made a full circle. (Watch the video for more guidance. I employ a sort of “slap and fold” technique, which is helpful with this very wet dough.) Cover the bowl.

Thirty minutes later, repeat the stretching and folding.

If time permits, repeat this stretching and folding twice more at 30-minute intervals. This is what the dough looks like after the third set of stretches and folds:

This is what the dough looks like after the 4th set. Feeling the dough transform from a sticky dough ball to a smooth and elastic one is really cool.

Transfer the dough to a straight-sided vessel and let it rise at room temperature until…

… it doubles in volume. (Note: If you don’t have a straight-sided vessel, you can simply let the dough rise in a bowl. I personally like using a straight-sided vessel because it allows me to see when the dough has truly doubled in volume.)

Then, punch down (deflate) the dough — I like to remove the dough from the vessel …

… and ball it up using wet hands.

Return the dough to the vessel; then transfer to the fridge. (Another plus of using the straight-sided vessel is that it’s easier to store in the fridge than a bowl.)

The dough will likely double in volume overnight in the fridge.

Remove the dough, turn it out onto a work surface…

… then ball it up. (Note: This is where I deviate from the traditional ciabatta-making method. If I were to follow the traditional path, I would have simply patted that blob of dough pictured above into a rectangle; the cut it in half. I find I get a more open crumb when I preshape the dough.)

Divide the dough into two equal portions. Ball up each portion. I like to do this with very little or no flour — I find I get better tension with less flour.

Sprinkle a work surface liberally with flour. Place the balls top-side down (the smooth side); then sprinkle the balls liberally with flour. Cover with a tea towel and let rest for 2.5 hours. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper.

After the 2.5 hours… the dough balls will look like this:

Turn the balls back over…

… then carefully transfer them to a parchment lined sheet pan.

Bake at 425ºF for 20-25 minutes or until nicely golden:

Let cool at least 20 minutes before slicing.

How to Make Ciabatta Rolls

Follow the recipe as outlined above or in the recipe box below until the step in which you remove the dough from the refrigerator; then, sprinkle a work surface with flour. Turn the dough out, sprinkle the surface with more flour, and pat it into a rectangle. (Note: This method, unlike above, follows a traditional ciabatta method — there’s no preshape or final shape. I prefer doing this with rolls for simplicity. It’s nice not having to ball up 8 portions of dough. If you wish, of course, you can ball up each round of dough.)

Divide into 8 portions.

Transfer to a sheet pan, cover with a tea towel, and let stand for 2 to 2.5 hours.

Transfer the pan to the oven, and bake at 425ºF for 20 to 25 minutes.

Let cool for at least 20 minutes before halving or slicing.

Print