Sydney’s inner west suburb of Haberfield is known around these parts as Little Italy.
I’m at the Haberfield shops at least once a week, visiting Johnny’s cheese shop, drinking chai lattes at Manny’s cafe, or buying pasta from my friend Joe at Peppe’s Pasta. Lorraine at NQN did a great walking tour of the suburb – grab a cup of tea and check it out here.
At the heart of Little Italy is Lamonica’s IGA – a supermarket quite unlike any other in Sydney. As well as standard groceries, they also stock a wide range of imported Italian goods, including interesting pastas, deli items, cake ingredients, olive oils, vinegars and more.
When I was there last week, they had Italian flour on sale, including 5kg bags of Granoro 00 for $8.99, and Granoro durum semolina flour for just $2/kg.
Semola Rimacinata di Grano Duro is re-milled durum wheat semolina – a superfine flour with 12% protein content (more information here). It’s great for making egg pasta, but I also find it the perfect flour for my ciabatta loaves. This one nearly attained the desired “slipper” shape…
A disclaimer: this isn’t how ciabattas are traditionally made, nor is the end result an authentic representation of anything other than what I call a ciabatta. My apologies to any purists out there who are miffed by this.
Having said that, the loaves have a chewy, elastic texture which we find highly addictive, and my family will eat all four loaves within a couple of days. This is not light fluffy white bread, and the crumb has an intriguing, almost plasticky shine in the holes…
This is also the bread I make when my hands are sore, because it requires very little actual kneading or shaping. Unfortunately as I get older, these things all have to be taken into consideration!
A note to my fellow sourdough bakers – the hydration of the dough is approximately 77%, which is quite high, but the durum wheat flour seems to absorb more moisture than regular bakers’ flour. Don’t be tempted to use fine or coarse semolina instead of semolina (durum wheat) flour – the former is too coarse and won’t absorb enough water, and you’ll end up with a soggy mess. If you can’t find semolina flour, substitute more bread flour in its place and reduce the water by about 5%.
Ciabatta con Semola Rimacinata di Grano Duro
(an original Fig Jam and Lime Cordial recipe)
- 300g active sourdough starter (fed at a ratio of one cup water to one cup flour)
- 675g iced water (must be at least fridge cold – this is important)
- 500g bakers/bread flour
- 500g Semola Rimacinata di Grano Duro (fine durum wheat semolina flour)
- 18g fine sea salt
1. Measure all the ingredients into a large mixing bowl.
2. Squelch and scrape everything together to form a sticky dough. Scrape your fingers off and cover the bowl with clingfilm.
3. After about an hour, give the dough a quick knead in the bowl, and cover it up again. Repeat this procedure when you’re next in the kitchen (within the next hour or so). Then cover the dough up and allow it to rise until doubled in size. In our Sydney weather, the time from initial squelching to the photo you see below was about six hours.
Place pizza stones into the oven if you’re using them, and preheat the oven to maximum (about 250C with fan).
4. When the oven is hot, generously dust the bench with rye flour. Scrape the dough onto the bench, flour your hands and gently pat it into a large rectangle. Now fold one third into the middle, and the other third over the top of it, to create a long thick rectangle. You might need to use the scraper to help you, as the dough will be quite sticky and wet.
5. Cut the dough into four roughly equal pieces.
6. Tear off four sheets of parchment paper and with well floured hands and the scraper, gently transfer a cut slice of dough onto a sheet of parchment, giving it a little stretch as you go to emulate the “slipper” that ciabatta is so famously named after. The dough will be quite soft and a bit sticky, so dust it with a little more rye flour if necessary, and also make sure you’ve got plenty of flour on your hands.
If you don’t have pizza stones, you can place the loaves onto a parchment lined tray instead. The loaves are immediately ready to bake – there’s no need for a second prove. Note: please check your parchment paper instructions to ensure that it can cope with these oven temperatures.
7. Spritz the tops of the dough with water, and immediately slide them onto the pizza stones to bake. Reduce the oven temperature to 220C with fan and bake for 20 minutes, then further reduce to 175C with fan and bake for another 15 – 20 minutes, until the crust is set to your liking. After the first 10 minutes or so, I like to carefully remove the parchment paper from under the loaves to allow the bottoms to brown up (don’t bother with this if you’re baking on a lined tray).
My oven will take four loaves at the one time, but if yours isn’t quite as ginormous, you could halve the recipe, or shape the dough into larger loaves to begin with.
Click here for a printable version of this recipe
PS. A little bread trivia from my miller friend Kevin Sherrie – research has shown that including a small percentage of durum wheat flour into bread dough will keep the finished loaves fresher than bread made solely from soft wheat flour. More information here.
. . . . .
Addendum: Maths isn’t my forte, but if you’re using a sourdough starter at 100% hydration, the following formula should work:
- 300g active sourdough starter (100%)
- 715g iced water
- 485g bakers/bread flour
- 485g Semola Rimacinata di Grano Duro (fine durum wheat semolina flour)
- 18g fine sea salt
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 
Bellissima! What gorgeous loaves you’ve produced there. Your description of the texture is just right, should be chewy and open with a thinnish crust. I’ve never had fluffy ciabatta.
I am sure I’ve read that ciabattta is a comparatively modern bread somewhere, so you can make it how you like! I bet it tastes wonderful with that fine Italian flour. Just beautiful!
They look like perfectly perfect (and perfectly yummy) ciabatta loaves to me! One of our favorite types of bread……
Although this looks absolutely delicious, I am going to go to the bakery in Via Lucia in Lucca and buy my ciabatta. Just call me lazy.
You have given me a massive craving for a piece of toasted ciabatta with olive oil and salt. Your loaves look delicious.
They look delicious Celia, just how I think ciabatta should be. I’m not quite confident enough to work with such wet dough yet, but when I am, I’ll be back!
Celia, once again, these look gorgeous. I am throwing out the rye starter that I fed last week as it doesn’t seem to have embraced the whole “starter” part of it’s label. I will just have to try again!
Four loaves in the oven at once?!…*sigh* Oh, now that would be wonderful.
love a good ciabatta.
They look delicious Celia. I wish I had such a well-stocked and inexpensive IGA near me.
I now have a craving for this bread, with some strong vintage hard cheese! A glass of wine and some chilli olives thrown in! Decadance! x
Your bread always looks impeccable I can’t imagine anyone getting miffed over it! Hungry yes but not miffed! Thanks so much for the lovely shoutout :)
Looks perfect! I would like a slice with unsalted butter and vegemite right now.
How nice to have such an interesting supermarket to explore, lucky you! Your loaves look beautiful too, yumm…
Oh yes they do look perfect Celia. Bellissima indeed :) I’m so lazy when it comes to baking bread, I can just imagine the smell as those loaves came out of the oven, awesome.
Thank you all! It’s a lot of fun to make, once you get a handle on manipulating the wet dough. If you’re anywhere near Haberfield, do stock up on the durum wheat flour – it’s usually $3/kg, but is selling for $2/kg at the moment. It makes a great pasta flour as well!
Your ciabatta looks wonderfully scrumptious! Good description of the process and nice photos as well. I still have one ciabatta in the freezer still to use, but I’d like to try this next. I just made my first starter so I’m very new to sourdough. If I have 150 g of starter at 100% percent hydration, how would I go about preparing the starter for the recipe if I’m going to make half the recipe? Thank you Celia!!!
Melanie, the easiest way to get to a starter at the same hydration as the recipe is to take a small amount of your existing starter and feed it up with half a cup of flour and half a cup of water. If you’re only making a half batch, you’ll end up with some starter leftover, but it’s easier to have some surplus than to try figuring out weight measures to get exactly 150g starter.
Alternatively, just use your 150g of 100% starter – the end dough will be a bit lower in hydration, but will probably still be ok and maybe a bit easier to manage! :)
Celia, I can’t imagine anyone being miffed at your ciabatta! I’ll have it at anytime of the day!
Soy
Cheese and wine! It needs cheese and wine!
Celia! I swear you should write a book. And I second J Cosmo, “Cheese and wine! Cheese and Wine!”
That ciabatta does look mighty fine. As is your oven capacity! We love that yellow packet flour from Haberfield IGA. My family swears that it makes the perfect pizza dough and they can always tell when I try to use other flour instead without declaring it up front. Have you tried the 00 blue packet flour as yet? I wonder how it compares to the flour we now “have” to buy since we can no longer that other lovely flour from Alain.
Soy, thank you! :)
Cosmo, Maz, you’re both right of course, and we did eat a loaf yesterday with goats’ cheese and riesling.. :)
SG, the 00 flour is very nice, but I don’t think it works as a bread flour – it’s only 9.5% protein. Although I used it in the maize sticks combined with bread flour, and it was great.
Yum! Yum! They look Devine C ( and the Italian is perfect too)
Wow, you have the best bread. I can’t wait to makea “debut” with semolina flour. Thankyou,
Craig
Tezza, thanks for being my Italian language consultant! :)
Craig, great to catch up the other day, hope you have fun with the flour! Thanks again for the goodies! :)
Hi Celia
I have been following your website for ages but have never tried any of your recipes – that is, until now. I was intrigued by your ciabatta recipe and decided to make it. I converted it to a 100% hydration sour dough starter and as I didn’t have your particular brand of duram wheat semolina and the brand I had wasn’t particularly fine, I gave it a jolly good whizz in my vita-mix, and then another for good measure. The results were excellent. I achieved large holes distributed evenly throughout the bread and the ‘plasticky shine’ you mentioned. I was very chuffed!
BTW you have an excellent site.
regards Glenda
Glenda, that’s fabulous, thanks for letting me know!! I have another batch on the bench right now – it’s so easy to make that I just throw it together whenever I have cold water in the fridge and a ripe starter on the bench. Thanks for reading the blog! :)
[…] It made a chewy and tasty bread, with huge holes and a crisp crust. The recipe can be found on Celia’s blog FigjamandLimeCordial. […]
Hi Celia,
Thanks for this recipe; I’ve just made it and it’s the perfect laid-back weekend bread: yummy, and no fiddly shaping!
Emily
Thanks for letting me know Emily, I’m so happy you enjoyed it! We now make it as our daily loaf – it’s so easy to knock up eight loaves in one hit, and it freezes brilliantly! :)