Bakery-Style Ciabatta Bread — No Kneading, No Equipment, No Fuss

So for years I was led to believe that you need a big old kitchen mixer to make ciabatta at home. However, I must be a sucker because that is not true. All you really do need is a bowl and a spoon. That's it. So for this recipe, all you need is a nice big bowl and a wooden spoon. This is a no need recipe, so no machine. All you need is time. Now our first ingredient is bread flour. Now hear me out. I want you to use bread flour because bread flour is strong and it gives you those lovely big bubbles and strength and chew in your bread. And that's the way ciabatta should be. If you want to use all purpose flour, then yes, you can use the same amount. However, bread flour is preferable for a dough like this. So add that into your bowl. Next, we're going to add in a small bit of whole wheat flour. This is a finely ground whole wheat flour. I'm going to add that in there. It does add nice flavor and a little bit of nuttiness to your bread. Next, we are going to add in some salt for obvious reasons. All bread needs salt and then a little bit of instant yeast. Now I use instant yeast. If you're going to use fast action yeast, then you're going to have to put that into your water. But for instant yeast, we're just going to put it in here with the flour and just give that a little stir. And then here in my jug, I have some nice kind of lukewarm water into that. I'm going to add in my olive oil and then simply add our wet into our dry and we're going to mix it together with a wooden spoon. You might notice that this is a little bit of a wetter dough. I find it that way with ciabatta. That is totally fine. Lovely. I adore these recipes that you can mix by hand. You don't need any special equipment and you get amazing results. Stay tuned because you're going to want to see the amazing ciabatta this dough makes. So once your dough is mixed, you're going to want to cover it up and keep it from the air. I use a shower cap because they're reusable and it keeps it nice and snug. Now here's what you want to do. Like I said, no special equipment needed. All you need here is time. So we are going to set this over to the side and let it hang out at room temperature for roughly around 18 hours. If you make it the night before, let it hang out overnight. What happens during this time is that gas builds up, the dough gets strong, it strengthens, it gets its texture, it gets its flavor. It's really, really a lovely time to just let the dough be. Then we're gonna come back tomorrow, shape it, get into the oven and enjoy it. So my ciabatta dough has fermented overnight and let's have a little sneaky peek. See what it looks like. Gorgeous. Look at that. It has risen up. It's lovely and bubbly, which is what I love. Also get a whiff of that. It smells amazing. It smells a little bit sour, a little bit boozy. I get emails often saying that they made bread, a fermented dough, and it was kind of acidic, a little bit sour. That's exactly what it's supposed to be like. You actually get used to that flavor and you want even more of it. So this is perfect spot on. So what we're going to do is just knock the air out of this dough. I'm going to put a little bit of flour on my hands and then I'm going to turn it out onto my floured surface. I can already tell this is going to be good bread because it feels like a lovely dough. So here's what I'm going to do. We're just going to divide the dough in half as evenly as we can. And then you end up with two kind of short loaves of bread. So here I have a tray lined with a nice clean tea towel. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to dust it liberally with some flour. And then what I'm going to do is just place my little rolls over here directly on the flour. I'm going to dust the top with some more flour and then just cover them over nice and snug. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to set these over to the side and let them prove for two hours at room temperature. Now that is a long time, but during this time you get those big, lovely bubbles that you see in a ciabatta. Now I don't want you to go anywhere because these don't go just straight into the oven. We do one more step and then they go into the oven. So stay tuned. So it's been two hours and our ciabatta is looking fantastic. See the way it's puffed up really well. And you can see that there's all these lovely bubbles trapped in there. That's exactly what we want. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to put a bit of flour on my hands and my sprinkle a little bit on my tray. Also, I've got a tray here lined with parchment paper. And what you want to do is very carefully roll your dough over. What we're going to do is flip our dough. And then as we turn it and it's flipped, we are going to pull it and place it on our baking tray. So you know when you get a ciabatta and you cut it open and you have these lovely big kind of stretched bubbles. This is what we're doing here. I'm going to do it with the second roll again. Here we are. We're going to turn it over carefully, pull it to around 16 inches and onto the tray. So you probably know by now, but the reason I tell you to liberally dust the tray with flour to begin with is because your dough is very wet. You don't want it to stick to it. So just make sure at the beginning you have lots of flour on your tea towel. Okay, so that's looking great. These are gorgeous. These are ready right now to go straight into a lovely hot oven. Check that out. One of my favorite things is hot bread straight out of the oven. And look how much this ciabatta puffed up. It got lovely and thick, which is fantastic. So just look at all those bubbles on the inside, the way we stretched our dough, the way we fermented it, built up all of those gorgeous bubbles. So that's your hard work paying off. It looks beautiful. Of course, now while it's still warm, I'm going to cut a little bit for Kevin and I. Georgie was excited. I don't know if you heard him. There you go. Oh man, Georgie, we got to give you some. A little bit of bread. I think that's the best review you could see. Lost the pacifier, went for the bread. Yeah. Oh, yummy, yummy, yummy. Well done, Gem. Gorgeous. Absolutely delicious. You're going to love this bread. It's got such great flavor as well. Gem, what if you made a pizza out of it? Yeah, you could do a pizza out of it. A pizza ciabatta. Check out all my other baking videos. I know you're going to like them. Even waffles want some too. There you go.