This easy Ciabatta Bread recipe will give you perfect crusty homemade bread with only five ingredients. This ciabatta dough can be made ahead and used to make either two loaves of ciabatta bread, or eight ciabatta rolls.
Hi! I am just popping in to share this easy ciabatta bread recipe with you! This super rustic, Italian style ciabatta bread is very low effort - it is a no knead bread recipe that uses an overnight rise to produce a super chewy, crusty bread. I love making homemade bread, and especially love a super easy no knead recipe that can be made ahead, such as my focaccia recipe. However I was after something in a slightly different format - enter this easy ciabatta recipe. This recipe is great for serving alongside dinner, but also makes the most amazing sandwiches.
I tested this recipe over and over in different formats so that I could give you all the tips and tricks for making easy ciabatta bread - this dough can be used to make ciabatta loaf, ciabatta rolls, and a ciabatta pull-apart bread, or all three if you like, with only a few tweaks.
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This is definitely not a super traditional ciabatta recipe, but it is my take on it - a simple, easy to make bread that we love and I really hope that you do too.
This ciabatta recipe is super super simple and has a very limited ingredient list - bread flour, instant yeast, olive oil, water, and salt.
Ciabatta bread is characterised by its crusty finish, and big holes inside the dough, which is often achieved by a long, slow rise, and high hydration. I played around with hydration a lot for this ciabatta recipe, pushing it as high as I could to get a dough that formed a lovely open crumb while not being too hard to work with.
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This ciabatta recipe has a hydration of 85% - hydration is calculated by dividing the weight of liquid in a recipe by the weight of the flour then multiplying it by 100, so in this case 445 ÷ 525 = 0.847, then 0.847 x 100 = 84.7, which we round up to 85%. This is a very wet dough - it is meant to be like that. You will need to flour your surface when you are shaping it quite heavily in order to make sure it does not stick, but do not worry - it is also a super forgiving dough and doesn't need a huge amount of shaping, and the second rise helps a lot to tidy things up before baking.
Ciabatta recipes often also use a biga, or a poolish - a portion of the flour in the recipe combined with yeast to make a sponge or a kind of starter for the recipe that is made the day before. I didn't use a biga, as I much prefer to make all the dough in one go and then have it in the fridge ready to go, but the first stage of this ciabatta dough recipe is done as an overnight rise in the fridge, so we still have the long, slow element that a biga provides.
The process of making homemade ciabatta is super easy - this is a relatively hands off recipe, you just need to allow time for an overnight rise. Here is how to do it:
Best Homemade Ciabatta Recipe
I find the best way to keep track of rising dough is to have two timers - one for the overall time, so in this case 2 hours, and the other measuring the time between stretch and folds that you re set each time you perform a set of stretch and folds.
There are a few ways you can shape your ciabatta dough depending on the format that you want it to be in. You can either bake it as two loaves, or it can also be made into eight ciabatta rolls, or baked all together to make more of a pull-apart bread bun or ciabatta slider buns.
It is Very Important that you use enough flour both on your work surface and when handling the dough as it is quite sticky. A bench scraper will be your friend here.
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About an hour before you are ready to bake, prepare your dough for baking and line a pan with floured parchment paper. Heavily flour a work surface (this is important to ensure the high hydration dough does not stick), then turn the dough out onto it.
To make loaves, shape the dough into a 24x24cm (9.5) square (It doesn't have to be super even), then cut down the middle to form two pieces of dough. Transfer to the baking sheet, flipping so the floured side is up (this is where the pattern on ciabatta comes from), then gently gently shape into loaves by tucking the edges under.
The process for making ciabatta rolls is very similar to making ciabatta loaves, except that you will shape the dough into a 28x20cm (8x11) rectangle instead, then cut into 8 rolls. Turn them over as you move them from the floured work surface to the sheet pan, to get the flour pattern from the counter as the top crust.
Easy Homemade Ciabatta Bread Recipe
Arrange the ciabatta buns on your sheet pan so they have some space between them, as they do flatten out slightly as they rest. It is not the end of the world if they touch a little!
Another way to bake this ciabatta bread which is even easier is to flop the dough out directly onto your sheet pan, and shape it into a square, then cut it into rolls and leave them as is. This means when they bake they will form a sort of pull-apart ciabatta bread, with super soft edges and a lovely crusty top.
To make ciabatta slider buns or ciabatta pull-apart bread, shape the dough into a 24x24cm (9.5) square and then cut into however many you want - I usually go for 16, so a 4x4 grid.
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The bake time for rolls and a loaf is similar, so if you wanted to divide the dough into one loaf and four rolls, that would work, just space them out on the same baking sheet.
Cold from the fridge, I find that my ciabatta dough usually takes about 45 minutes to an hour to rise for the second time before it is ready to bake.
The best way to tell if a dough is ready to rise is to gently poke the top of the dough with a floured finger. If it springs back straight away, you know it needs more time. If it leaves a small indentation which slowly springs back, you know that it is proofed and ready to go into the oven.
Sourdough Ciabatta Bread
Remember that the time that a dough takes to rise hugely depends on your environment so it is important to go by how the dough looks rather than the time in the recipe.
This is sad but sometimes is happens. If you leave your dough rising for too long, the yeast can use up all its energy, and then have nothing to give when the dough goes in the oven.
You will know if you have over proofed your dough if it collapses when you touch it, or if it doesn't rise in the oven. It is also very important to make sure that your yeast isn't expired - to test this, place a little in some lukewarm water with a pinch of sugar, and check that it bubbles.
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I left dough in the fridge for three days and it still baked up ok - it was definitely lacking a little in spring but it tasted amazing still. This dough is super forgiving as it doesn't really need to be shaped, so it was ok to just flop out and rise it and bake it off.
This ciabatta recipe is a current favourite for many reasons - one of them being that it freezes super well. When I was testing it over the last few months I would do a few a/b tests and end up with four loaves at a time (not a bad problem to have!), and would freeze two to have later.
To freeze bread, either wrap tightly or place in an airtight bag, and freeze. It will keep in the freezer, if stored properly, for up to three months.
Ciabatta Pizza Bread.
To defrost frozen bread, either leave in the fridge overnight or defrost at room temperature. I always find it is nice to either refresh defrosted bread in the oven before using, or eat it toasted or turned into garlic bread.
Yes - it is important that you use bread flour for this ciabatta recipe as it provides strength. I tested it with all-purpose flour and it didn't work as well - the dough was not strong enough for the hydration in the recipe. Bread flour is also called high grade flour or strong flour depending on where you live!
Yes, if you want to you can add discard to give flavour while still relying on the yeast to rise the bread, but I do not know
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