Probably the easiest high hydration sourdough bread (Sourdough Ciabatta)

This easy sourdough ciabatta recipe produces two beautiful, open crumb ciabatta loaves. It doesn’t require an autolyse or any complicated steps. Plus, you can bake these on a baking stone if you have one, or on a metal sheet pan if you don’t. It’s a super flexible recipe and perfect for home bakers.

Written Recipe:

Sourdough Ciabatta Recipe (Easy, No Autolyse)

All of the recipes in the 52 Weeks of Sourdough series:
https://grantbakes.com/52

Today, I’ll walk you through how to make sourdough chabatada. This Italian bread has a very thin and crispy crust on the outside, but the interior is very fluffy, airy, light, and bubbly. Because the shaping process for chabatada is so minimal, this is probably one of the easiest high hydration sourdough breads you can make. Start by adding 350 g of water to a mixing bowl. This is going to be an 80% hydration sourdough bread. Then, get out 100 g of sourdough starter. I fed this the night before. Took 25 g of starter out of the fridge, fed it 50 g of water and 50 g of bread flour. The next morning, it was ready to use. So, just add 100 g of starter into your mixing bowl. Then add 10 g of salt. I’m using kosher salt, but you could use any kind of plain table salt or sea salt as well. Then, stir the starter and salt into the water until they dissolve and make the water look a little bit milky. Now, for the bread flour, I like to use this blue bag of bread flour. It gives a nice chewy and airy and light result in the final bread. Add 450 g of bread flour right into your mixing bowl. That was it. Just four ingredients and now you’re ready to stir. So stir all of the dough ingredients together until it forms a really wet dough. At first the dough might seem a little bit dry as you’re mixing it. But it is an 80% hydration dough, which means there’s a lot of water in there. So after about a minute or so of mixing, the flour will absorb all the water and you’ll end up with a fairly wet and sticky dough. If you touch it with your fingers, you’ll notice just how sticky it is. But that’s exactly what you’re looking for. So, cover your dough up with a kitchen towel and let it rest for 30 minutes. A half hour later, your dough will already look a little bit different. It’ll hold together better. Basically, it’s gained some strength and structure as the gluten has started to form. Now, it’s time to do stretch and folds to further develop the gluten. You’re going to be doing three sets of stretch and folds with a halfhour rest in between each set. So, for the first set of stretch and folds, loosen up the dough from the bowl and then grab an edge of the dough, stretch it up into the air and fold it over. Then give the bowl a quarter turn. Grab the next edge, stretch it up and fold it over. Quarter turn again. Grab an edge of the dough, stretch it up into the air, and fold it down. One last quarter turn. Stretch the edge of the dough up into the air and fold it over. That was one set of stretch and folds. You’re going to be repeating that two more times with a half hour rest in between each one. So cover your dough up again and let it rest for 30 minutes. Now you’re ready for the second set of folds. Stretch and fold. Stretch and fold. Stretch and fold. Stretch and fold. Exactly the same as the first time. Then let the dough rest for 30 minutes. Now for the third and final set of stretch and folds. You’re getting some air bubbles in the dough by now. And your dough should feel a lot stronger. Stretch and fold each of the four corners of the dough one last time. And that is your third and final set of stretch and folds. Now it’s time for the first rise or the bulk fermentation. And for that, I usually like to use a glass bowl so that I can see through the sides and see how much the dough is rising. And for chabata, I love to use a square glass container specifically because for chabata, the goal from here on out is to touch the dough as little as possible. You don’t want to knock out any more air from the dough than you have to. And when you use a square container like this 8 by8 baking dish or any other kind of square glass container, it’ll be very easy to let the dough rise in the container and then dump it out of the container later and it’ll be in a nice square shape. You won’t need to do very much shaping at all. So it’ll be very easy not to knock out air from the dough. So once you’ve got your square container, grease it with about a teaspoon of olive oil, just a little bit to create a non-stick barrier. And then gently transfer the dough from the mixing bowl into the glass container. Then flatten the dough ever so slightly with your fingertips and cover it up with the lid or a sheet of plastic wrap. Anything that’s airtight will be good. Then move the dough somewhere on your kitchen counter where it can rise at room temperature for 3 to 5 hours or until it completely doubles in size. To an extent, the more you’re able to let your dough puff up during bulk fermentation, the better. More air bubbles equals a bubblier and fluffier chabata. So, I like to let my dough completely double in size before I move on to the next step. Once it reaches the top of this lid, I know it has doubled in size. To keep developing good flavor and extra bubbles in the dough, you want to move your dough at this point to the fridge for an overnight rest. Let it rest for 8 to 12 hours in the cold fridge. It’s pretty warm here, and I let my dough go a full 12 hours, and it was absolutely busting out of the container. There was so much fermentation activity going on in this dough, so many bubbles. This dough was ready to be shaped, proofed, and baked. To shape your chabata dough, you really can’t use too much flour. This is a dough that you can use a lot of flour on and just brush off the excess if needed. So, generously dust your kitchen counter with bread flour or allpurpose flour and then gently loosen the sides of the dough from the container. Then, flip the container of dough over and the dough should just slowly pull itself away from that container and fall right on top of that flowered surface. And if any dough is hanging onto the glass, just pull it off with your fingertips. Now you’re ready to divide this dough into two equal pieces and to shape them into two chabata loaves. It’s going to be a very easy, gentle shaping. So start by dusting the top of the dough with more bread flour or all-purpose flour. There should now be a generous amount of flour on both sides of the dough. And now using a bench scraper or a chef’s knife, cut a line right down the middle of the dough, dividing the dough into two equally sized pieces. I wouldn’t weigh out the two pieces of dough to try to get them to weigh exactly the same amount. That would require a lot of handling of the dough. And at this point, you want to touch the dough as little as possible, trying to knock out as little air as possible from the dough. You want these to be nice and airy. So, as far as hands-on shaping, all you need to do is just tuck the edges of the dough underneath the loaf, smoothing out the edges and rounding out the corners. Repeat that process for both of the chabata loaves. And that is pretty much it. All you need to do now is transfer these loaves onto a sheet of parchment paper for the final proof. So, get out a piece of parchment paper that’s the same size as the baking steel or pizza stone or whatever baking tray you’ll be baking these on. Then, carefully transfer each chabata loaf onto the parchment paper by slipping your fingertips underneath the loaf, lifting it up into the air, and placing it directly on the parchment paper. This is an easy way to transfer the chabata loaves without knocking much of the air out. Now, take a scissors and slice right down the middle of the piece of parchment paper, separating the two loaves. This will allow you to lift up each piece of dough individually and place it onto the baking stone later. Now, your chabata doughs are ready for one last final proof. So, cover them up with a kitchen towel and let them rise at room temperature for 45 minutes to an hour. That’s all the time they’ll need to puff up a little bit bigger and be ready to bake. Then 30 minutes before you’re ready to bake, preheat your oven to 450° Fahrenheit. And make sure you have a pizza stone or a baking steel on the middle rack with a metal pie pan or cake pan on the bottom rack. You’re going to be using that for a steam tray. Now, let the oven preheat for at least 30 minutes. Now, once your sourdough chabatada doughs have risen for at least 45 minutes to an hour, they should be puffy, jiggly, and ready to bake. So, just lift them up, parchment paper and all, and you can transfer them directly onto your baking stone or your pizza stone, or you can put them onto a metal sheet pan and slide that into the middle rack of your oven. My baking steel was only 12 in wide, so it was just wide enough to hold both of these loaves. I just made sure to adjust them a little bit so that they wouldn’t fall off the sides as they were rising. Now, slide the doughs into the oven. And then, for your steam tray, add one cup of boiling or really hot water into that metal pan on the bottom rack of your oven. That’ll fill your oven with steam just like a professional bakery oven. And you can bake your loaves for 20 minutes with steam at 450 degrees Fahrenheit. 20 minutes later, remove the steam tray from the oven. You don’t need any more steam during the last little part of the bake. Your loaves should have puffed up nicely to their full potential. Now, you’ll want to bake them for an additional 10 minutes without steam until they get nice and dark brown. When you pull the chabata loaves out of the oven, let them rest on a wire rack or a cooling rack for at least 30 minutes before you slice in. These chabata loaves are beautifully golden brown. They puffed up nicely, and they have that classic flour dusted look to them, even though they don’t have any excess flour on them after they’re done baking. They have a crispy crust that’s still really thin. The crust is very delicate, and you can tell when you pick up one of the loaves just how airy it is on the inside. The loaf really feels light when you pick it up. Today, my sourdough chabata loaves had a very moderately open crumb, a few irregular holes here and there, but I found that the way my bread looks on the inside can vary a lot from bake to bake depending on a lot of different factors. So, as long as it feels light and it’s nice and airy, it’s a good chabata in my opinion. You can slice your chabata loaves in half lengthwise like I did with the first loaf to make a sourdough chabata sandwich. Or if you want to have some bread alongside your meal, you’ll probably want to slice your chabatada into little pieces like this. And hopefully from this angle, you can see just how airy, fluffy, and light these are. As far as flavor goes, this chabata has a light tanginess from the sourdough starter and just a really delicious and complex sourdough bread flavor that I love. And these have a really thin, crackly, crispy crust that I really enjoy as well. It’s a great piece of bread to enjoy alongside almost any meal. I do think this is one of the easiest high hydration loaves of sourdough bread you can make. But if you want to make a different recipe for high hydration sourdough bread, I’ll link to another video of mine from a few weeks ago right here.