This bread is such a treat. It’s soft, incredibly open, and light in hand—almost like a bushel of puffy marshmallows bound together by a crust poised to shatter at the slightest pressure. This is a loaf of bread that asks you to tear it with hands, dunked into the best olive oil in the pantry. That is if you can stop yourself from cutting it in half and sandwiching together all manner of delicious ingredients (I couldn’t, as you’ll see later). I hope this sourdough ciabatta bread recipe becomes a regular in your kitchen as it has been in mine.
—ciabatta means slipper in Italian—have a sturdy crust that provides the right platform for ensnaring anything and everything one could conceivably use for a sandwich. As you'll see later in this post, I found myself making sandwiches with just about everything lying around in my fridge—not to mention all the fresh vegetables from the market.
And while the appeal of this specialty bread is evident, it can be a challenging dough to work with at first attempt. It's more comfortable in a sense there's no preshaping or shaping, really, but the high hydration and slack dough can elicit a few choice words at divide time.
My Small Starter, Loose Rules, Homemade Sourdough Bread Method
For this reason, I highly recommend you use a mixer with this sourdough ciabatta bread recipe if you have access to one. It’s possible to mix this by hand, but the dough can get unruly when mixing on the counter. When I did combine this by hand, I relied heavily on the bassinage technique, whereby I add water in stages as I strengthen the dough. See the section on Mixing and the Bassinage Technique a little later in this post for more details.
I’ve iterated on this recipe utilizing a variety of grains, ranging from all modern wheat to spelt to khorasan (Kamut). Out of all the trials and tests, I found khorasan to add just the right amount of color and flavor to this ciabatta. In using 15% whole grain khorasan, the grain imparts its characteristic golden hue and buttery, sweet flavor. The beauty of this formula, though, is that the 15% can be used as a playground for whatever grain you fancy (spelt sure was good, too, and you all know I have a soft spot for spelt).
I milled the whole Khorasan berries into fine flour on my Mockmill 100 countertop mill. Because Khorasan is a relatively “hard” berry, it takes a bit longer to mill the grain, but it's not a problem for the Mockmill. In this formula, I also utilize a relatively large percentage of high-gluten (high protein) white flour. Why? In testing, I found this flour helped to support the high water percentage and a small amount of extra virgin olive oil. I made this bread without high-gluten flour, and it was still quite delicious, but the interior wasn't quite as open as I envisioned. Typical ciabatta is made with a large percentage of high-gluten flour, but I like to keep this as low as possible (to avoid a potentially gummy interior) while still retaining the aesthetic and texture I'm after. Always a balancing act.
Sourdough Ciabatta Sandwich Rolls
One approach to working with highly wet dough, such as the one in this sourdough ciabatta bread recipe, is to hold back a large percentage of the mixing water until after the dough has developed some strength through mixing. This technique, commonly referred to as
Frequent readers of my site know I do this almost every bake to some degree, but holding back even more water makes this more useful with a dough such as this. Adding a lot of water to the dough at the start makes mixing difficult: if using a mixer, the mixing arm cannot “grab” the dough, and the arm will slosh around in the mixing bowl. Mixing by hand might even be impossible as the dough never really holds together as it falls apart every turn.
With this recipe, I highly recommend you use a mixer if you have one available.I prefer to hold back about 25% (300g in the case of this formula) of the total water in the recipe until after I moderately develop the dough in the mixer. At this point, stop the mixer and pour in some of the reserved water. Turn the mixer back on to incorporate and continue to add the water in over the next several minutes in small increments as it’s fully absorbed. As always, remember to stop adding water if the dough starts to fall apart, showing signs of reaching maximal hydration.
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For some of my more wet bread doughs lately, I've been using my Haussler Alpha mixer, picked up fromPleasant Hill Grain. I've had this mixer for a while now and have had a chance to put it to the test. It's built like a tank with high-quality components and is an exceptional machine. I'm planning on writing a full guide on using this mixer shortly. A Famag spiral mixer or KitchenAid mixer with a dough hook will also work well to develop this dough.
The following sourdough ciabatta bread recipe results in four large ciabatta. I baked these in two batches of two in my home oven. When baking the first two, I placed the remaining two in the fridge on a proofing board, still held at the sides by a couche (to retain shape).
This is a roll-up of the entire formula for this dough. Read on to see the levain and the dough mix broken out into two separate tables. For an in-depth explanation on how I use Baker's Percentages below, see my beginner's sourdough post.
Sourdough Ciabatta Recipe (easy, No Autolyse)
This is a fast levain build: we go from feeding to maturity in only 3 hours. The high inoculation percentage and warm temperature expedite the maturation of this levain.
The above images show my levain when fully ripe, just before I add it to the Dough Mix at 1:00 p.m., below. Note the streaks on the side of the glass in the image on the left: this recent fall, along with significant aeration and slightly sour smell, indicates to me it's ripe (mature) and ready to be used.
Note that the table below shows the weights for the ingredients only for the final dough mix. In other words, the weight of the flour here will be less than the Total Formula lists above because some flour needs to be used to build the levain, above.
Easy Bread Machine Sourdough Ciabatta
First, mill the required whole-grain khorasan listed in the Total Formula, above. Then, build the levain (mix everything listed in the Levain section, above) and store somewhere around 78°F (25°C) ambient until ripe, about 3 hours.
Add the called forflour, and all but 300g of the called for waterto a mixing bowl. Three-hundred grams is quite a lot of water to hold back when first mixing, but we will add this water slowly through mixing using the bassinage technique.
Mix on speed one until everything is incorporated, about 30 seconds. Then, switch the mixer to speed 2 and mix for 4 minutes. After 4 minutes, start adding the rest of the reserved water, a little bit at a time, throughout an additional 4 minutes for a total of 8 minutes mix time.
Communal Tins Of Sourdough Starter Are Popping Up On Trees In San Francisco
As you can see in the mixing progress images above (left: after mixing 4 minutes, and right: at the end of mixing), the dough will still be plenty wet and sticky by the end of mixing, but smoother and with some strength. At the end of mixing the dough will not pass a full windowpane test, but will come very close. Be sure to mix this dough sufficiently!
For bulk fermenting this dough I used the11-quart Rubbermaid rectangular tub I have listed on My Baking Tools page—it's the perfect size for 2 kg of dough (and more). It makes dividing the dough into four equal rectangles much more straightforward: when the container is inverted it drops the dough in a perfect rectangle.
During this phase (of the two-step bulk fermentation phase), give the dough a total of 3 sets of vigorous stretch and folds separated by 30 minutes each. The first set happens 30 minutes after the beginning of bulk (i.e., 1:50 p.m.). The dough will be very slack and wet, use wet hands and perform the folds quickly. After the third set let the dough rest the remainder of bulk fermentation untouched.
Sourdough Ciabatta Recipe ( Ciabatta Rolls)
After the last set of stretch and folds, let the dough rest until the full 2 hours and 30 minutes of bulk fermentation have elapsed. This duration, at around 75-78°F (23-25°C), will certainly push the activity in this dough—which is what we want. The next day when you remove the dough from the fridge, you’ll see plenty of signs of a well-fermented dough.
First, put aside any notion of using only a small amount of bench flour when handling this dough. The heavy use of dusting flour not only means you can control the dough more naturally, it makes it possible. And anyway, the thin veil of flour on the crust adds to the classic look and visual appeal.
Using your plastic scraper, loosen
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