makes 2 loaves
Here is the origin story of ciabatta that I learned early in my career. According to legend, ciabatta was the bread Roman legionnaires ate just before they headed into battle. The dough was mixed by slaves treading in a trough full of flour, water, and verjus (the supertart juice of unripe grapes). The loaves themselves looked very much like a slipper—batta in Italian—and were said to be the same size as the sandal of a Roman soldier.
That should have been the tip-off. Look at your average ciabatta, then look at your foot. The ciabatta is bigger, right? Roman soldiers would have had to have enormous feet to fill a loaf.
It turns out that—as is often the case with food origin stories—the slave-treaded, verjus-laced ciabatta actually has less colorful and more recent roots. What appears to have happened is that French baguettes were making big inroads into the Italian bread market. Rather than surrender the Italian sandwich to the Northern invaders, a miller and baker named Arnaldo Cavallari experimented with a lot of flours and doughs before landing on a high-gluten dough based on a stiff pre-ferment. The result was the snack bread he named ciabatta.
If you want to test your skill with a goopy dough, here’s your chance. That said, ciabatta looks a lot harder to work with than it really is, although patience is required for a successful outcome. You will definitely need to use a bit more flour during the stretch and fold and shaping phases. Then, for the final stages of fermentation, this dough sits at room temperature for 3 hours, a step that’s best done on a floured wooden board.