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Simple ciabatta recipe – delicious Italian bread
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Simple ciabatta recipe – delicious Italian bread

★★★★★ 4.7 · 30 ratings · by Vanessa Pur

Really easy, delicious and simple ciabatta recipe as a light soft fluffy bread with delicious crust. Homemade Italian bread for dinner and salad or barbecue. Fresh and homemade even better than from the bakery with simple ingredients.

🇩🇪🇺🇸 One recipe, two kitchens — grams ⇄ cups, switch right in the card.
Prep
5 min
Cook
50 min
Total
55 min
Servings
30 slices
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by Vanessa Pur· Updated September 25, 2026
350SHARES

The tastiest and easiest ciabatta recipe for best Italian bread as a side dish for dinner. Dinner breads fit perfectly into Italian cuisine and besides focaccia, we love to bite into this soft yeast bread. While we used to quickly buy our ciabatta from the bakery, today we can only bake it ourselves with our best ciabatta recipe. So fresh, so soft and so delicious with just the ingredients we like.

Simple ciabatta recipe - delicious Italian bread as a dinner bread - best and easy ciabatta recipe for delicious Italian bread as dinner bread with salad, barbecue, pasta or even pure with olive oil,

Ciabatta is Italian, young, and often badly made. It was invented in 1982 as an answer to the French baguette, and its signature is an open, irregular crumb full of large holes with a thin, blistered crust.

Those holes come from one thing: very wet dough. The hydration runs far higher than a standard bread dough, which means you do not knead it in any conventional sense — you fold it in the bowl and let time do the work. Resist adding flour when it feels unmanageable; a dough that handles easily will bake into a tight, ordinary loaf. Handle the shaped pieces gently so the gas stays where it is.

pureFOOD.TV - Recipes & RestaurantsRecipe
Appetizer & Starter · by Vanessa Pur

Simple ciabatta recipe – delicious Italian bread

★★★★★ 4.7 · 30 ratings
Rate:
Simple ciabatta recipe – delicious Italian bread
5 minPrep
50 minBake/Cook
30slices
65kcal / serving
slices  30

Ingredients

  • 500 g all purpose flour
  • 14 g instant yeast
  • 3 EL olive oil
  • 2 TL fine salt
  • 1 TL sugar
  • 350 ml water, still (lukewarm)

Instructions

  1. Knead flour, yeast, olive oil, salt, sugar and lukewarm water in a food processor to a fluffy dough for about 2 minutes.
  2. Then let the dough rest for at least 50 minutes, optimally 2 hours. Start 50 minutes timer here
  3. Now optionally add olives and finely chopped walnuts and cut the dough in half if you want to bake two loaves of the same size.
  4. Knead an elongated wide shape, adding plenty of flour to the outsides to finish.
  5. Place the loaves on a baking tray lined with baking paper (preferably with holes) and bake at 220 °C for 20-25 minutes. Start 20 minutes timer here
  6. Let cool and enjoy still fresh pure, with butter, with olive oil, herb butter or sour cream.
Tip After cooling, you can also freeze the leftovers very well in a freezer bag and then let them bake fresh again something. We like the bread pure as well as with walnuts or olives. Try with pleasure also a few additional Italian herbs.
Nutrition per serving
65kcal
0.3 gFat
13 gCarbs
2 gProtein
0.2 gSugar
More recipes at purefood.tv /simple-ciabatta-recipe-delicious-italian-bread/

Instructions for the perfect Ciabatta bread recipe for Italian bread

First, mix 550 wheat flour with dry yeast, olive oil, salt, sugar and lukewarm water. I like to use my food processor for this. After about two minutes, a homogeneous dough is formed. Then let this dough rest for at least 50 minutes. For me, I got the best results with two hours of waiting.

Then you can knead olives or walnuts into the dough on a floured work surface. With 500g of flour, I like to divide the dough in half to make two loaves and sometimes intentionally make different sized loaves. Knead the border into an elongated, wide shape and add plenty of flour to the outsides to finish.

To bake, place the loaves on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper (preferably with holes) and bake at 220 degrees (top and bottom heat) for 20-25 minutes. Then let cool and enjoy while still fresh.

Simple ciabatta recipe - delicious Italian bread as a dinner bread - best and easy ciabatta recipe for delicious Italian bread as dinner bread with salad, barbecue, pasta or even pure with olive oil,

Best ciabatta recipe for tastiest bread for dinner to go with it… better than Italian…

If you like, you can also refine your ciabatta bread with green or black olives. Nuts, such as walnuts, also taste very good in this soft bread. Especially delicious are also dried tomatoes that have been incorporated into the dough. You can also try different Italian herbs and spices.

This perfect, Italian bread tastes really fresh and delicious. The ciabatta recipe tastes great plain or with green or black olives. Nuts, like walnuts also fit perfectly in terms of taste.

Simple ciabatta recipe - delicious Italian bread as a dinner bread - best and easy ciabatta recipe for delicious Italian bread as dinner bread with salad, barbecue, pasta or even pure with olive oil,

It is perfect as a side dish for dinner, but also pure for dinner, just as you like. We rather often have to control ourselves not to get full from the bread in advance, before the main course comes. But probably this is in our genes, since we all grew up mostly with a lot of bread.

We like to serve olive oil or balsamic oil with coarse sea salt flakes with the finished ciabatta bread. The bread is also perfect with herb butter, regular butter or various spreads. You can use the ciabatta recipe in many ways and even bake it directly with delicious herbs.

Simple ciabatta recipe - delicious Italian bread as a dinner bread - best and easy ciabatta recipe for delicious Italian bread as dinner bread with salad, barbecue, pasta or even pure with olive oil,

Easy basic ciabatta recipe

Sometimes it’s really amazing how few ingredients you need to make a delicious bread. With simple ingredients and a little time for the yeast, you quickly have a light ciabatta recipe baked. It simply tastes best when you bake it yourself. You can’t get Italian bread fresher anywhere.

Focaccia recipe – bread with olives and tomatoesFocaccia recipe – bread with olives and tomatoesOur best focaccia recipe for the popular classic focaccia, the Ligurian flatbread made from yeast dough with olives, tomatoes, herbs and salt.Also try our Italian focaccia recipe… →

Ciabatta as the best Italian bread recipe

Ciabatta recipe is one of the most popular bread recipes from Italian cuisine. Along with the famous focaccia, the ciabatta bread recipe is an absolute classic. We love the tender yet firm crust on the ciabatta and then the super soft bread interior to go with it. It’s really hard to restrain yourself from eating all the bread in one sitting.

If you do have some ciabatta bread left over after dinner, this ciabatta recipe is also great for freezing. You can then just bake it up again later after defrosting and it tastes really fresh again.

This ciabatta recipe is one of our favorites and is baked again and again. It goes well with many light dishes, especially in the summer. We love the Italian bread with various salads, fish and barbecue evenings.

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About the author
Vanessa Pur
Baker & founder of pureFOOD.TV

I have been baking and cooking for my family and community for years — honest recipes, all tested in my own kitchen and explained step by step so they turn out reliably for you too.

More about Vanessa →