Easy Ciabatta Bread Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Is ciabatta bread soft or hard? ›

I've long loved ciabatta bread for its chewy exterior and soft crumb speckled with air holes. It's the perfect bread for dunking into soup, slicing horizontally and making a sandwich, converting to garlic bread, or for simply slathering with butter and eating until your heart's content.

Add Sugar

Adding sugar weakens the gluten structure, absorbs water, and eventually makes the bread lighter and softer. As a result, sugar improves the bread's taste, structure and texture. Yeast also eats up sugar to produce carbon dioxide, which raises the dough and makes bread fluffy.

Ciabatta is baked with a much higher hydration level, making the holes within the dough much bigger than a baguette. Ciabatta is also baked with a much stronger flour, which has a more delicate and sweet taste. Baguettes also tend to be baked more golden brown.

Traditional Ciabatta: An Overview

Ciabatta dough is wet and sticky with hydration levels often 80% or higher.

Soft Crust

If your crust is becoming soft too quickly and not staying crispy you simply need to bake the bread longer. The best way to do this is to lower the temperature of your oven slightly and bake a few more minutes to achieve the same color you would have at the higher temperature.

No.

“Ciabatta bread is relatively high in carbohydrates and has nearly zero grams of fiber,” Richards cautioned. Mowrer added some other red flags, which include “higher carbs, calories and sodium per slice compared to other bread.”

There's something magical about the bread you get at your local bakeries - they're always sooo soft and fluffy. Many of these breads, especially packaged ones, are made with a ton of chemical additives such as calcium propionate, amylase, and chlorine dioxide which help keep them soft, light, and fluffy for days.

“If the dough has risen too long, it's going to feel fragile and might even collapse as you poke it,” says Maggie. If this is the case, there's a chance you can save your dough by giving it a quick re-shape. Learn more about this fix in our blog on saving overproofed dough.

Does Rising Bread Affect Its Texture? For a fluffy bread texture, the key is to let the bread rise long enough.

The name derives from its appearance, as ciabatta in Italian means 'slipper', referring to its long, flat shape. Although throughout history there have been many breads that resemble ciabatta, the exact bread variety is actually quite new on the scene in regards to other traditional Italian breads.

What flour is ciabatta made from? ›

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.

Ciabatta's unique flavor and texture are the result of the bread's unusual baking process. The dough is made with a high hydration level, which makes it wet and sticky. The dough is then stretched and folded, which helps to create the bread's distinctive air pockets.

Use your senses: Sound

“For crusty artisan bread, one way to determine doneness is by thumping the bottom of the loaf,” says Barb. “Give it a few quick knocks on the bottom of the loaf with your knuckles; if it sounds hollow, that tells you it's fully baked.”

Try less water with your flour. Uneven heat in your oven can be the culprit – if you loaf is nicely golden on the outside but gummy or moist in the inside, it's baking too quickly on the outside. Trying reducing the temperature you're baking at and bake for a bit longer.

Wetting the dough causes the surface to steam. Covering it traps the moisture. This partnership stops the bread from drying out on the surface in the hot air of the oven and forming a premature crust. Your bread rises more and produces a richer colour, becoming glossy on the surface.

Ciabatta is high in hydration, which means it contains high amount of water. This makes handling the ciabatta dough little tough. To make making ciabatta bread easy, you can use a strong bread flour, which has high gluten levels and absorbs good amount of water.

For example, ciabatta bread has a higher water content, giving ciabatta an airier and lighter texture compared to sourdough bread. Ciabatta bread also has a crustier outer layer while sourdough bread tends to be chewier. These two types of bread also have differences in taste.

Brioche bread tends to be incredibly soft and tender due to its rich ingredients like butter and eggs. It's often praised for its delicate texture. Brioche is a French bread known for its rich, buttery flavor and a soft, tender crumb.

In the oven: Preheat oven to 200° or Warm setting. Wrap the bread in a damp (not soaking) towel, place on a baking sheet, and pop it in the oven for 5-10 minutes. In the microwave: Wrap the bread in a damp (not soaking) towel, place it on a microwave-safe dish, and microwave on high for 10 seconds.