Roasted Garlic Olive Oil Ciabatta

This thick and crusty roasted garlic and fennel olive oil ciabatta is easy to make and jam packed with roasted garlic flavor. In this post you'll learn how to make a loaf of garlic olive oil ciabatta in just under 5 hours, with no fancy kneading or mixers required.

It's excellent for sopping up my best-ever spaghetti and meatballs and also so good for making one of my personal favorite appetizers: toasty ciabatta garlic bread.

There's no fancy bread shaping required when you're making ciabatta, which makes it a great beginner bread recipe. Just plop the dough out onto a floured counter, cut it into as many loaves or rolls as you want, and you're ready to bake!

Ciabatta is a lovely, assertive bread that can handle a lot of flavor being added in the baking process. As a certified Garlic Girlie (TM) I added a whole bulb of roasted garlic and fennel seeds to it. The one-two punch of the roasted garlic and the aromatic fennel makes it just a little more interesting. Don't like fennel? No worries, it's optional!

This is a great ciabatta recipe for beginners because it doesn't involve an overnight pre-ferments or sourdough starters. You will want to make the roasted garlic in advance, but this easy garlic ciabatta recipe can be done in the span of a single afternoon.

Ingredient Notes

You don't need anything fancy to make this roasted garlic and fennel olive oil ciabatta. Here's what you'll need:

Garlic and fennel - Wrap the fennel seeds in the foil with the garlic bulb when you roast it so they get nicely toasted at the same time. Use whole or lightly crushed fennel seeds. If you're not roasting them with the garlic bulb, you can toast them in a pan to bring out their flavor.

Folding Ciabatta Bread Dough

There are a few ways to add strength and flavor to your bread dough — some doughs require vigorous kneading, some require the slow and steady progression of time, and others, like this ciabatta dough, require folding.

After mixing all your ingredients together, you'll let the dough ferment for three hours. In that time, the yeast will start eating all the delicious sugars and starches in the dough and converting them into gas (aka air bubbles).

Those air bubbles are what makes your dough rise. But rising alone won't strengthen the gluten of your dough or develop the flavor. For that, you need to fold the dough every 30 minutes over the course of 3 hours (6 sets of folds total).

The nice thing about this recipe is that you can do all your folds right in your mixing bowl, no need to move the dough from the bowl to your counter and back again.

What to expect: At first, your dough will be loose, messy, and pretty stretchy. As the gluten develops with each set of folds, the dough will become stronger and harder to stretch. It will also grow slightly in size as air bubbles are trapped inside.

Below you can see what the dough looks like before and after 6 sets of folds.

How to Cut Ciabatta Loaves or Rolls

Before you put your dough in the oven, you'll get to decide what kind of loaf (or loaves) you want.

First, you'll gently stretch the dough to a roughly 8"x10" rectangle. Then, it's entirely up to you how you want to cut it:

• Two long loaves
• Four medium-sized rectangular loaves
• Eight square-ish rolls

They all bake for the same amount of time.

Mix it up if you want to — one long loaf and four square-ish rolls; one long loaf, one medium-sized rectangle loaf, and two square-ish rolls; or heck, make eight triangles if you want. The end pieces almost always end up vaguely triangular, anyway.

This is one of the things I love most about ciabatta dough, by the way. There is absolutely NO SHAPING the way bread usually requires. It's so easy it almost feels like cheating. You simply turn your dough out onto the floured countertop, loosely stretch it into a rectangle, and then cut it. That's it! Your ciabatta has its shape.

In fact, if you do anything more than that you risk ruining the shape and the flour swirls, so once you cut it — leave it alone until it's time to bake.

Flip the loaves for extra pretty floury stripes

One of ciabatta's distinguishing features is a domed top with a unique pattern of swirls and stripes of flour.

To create this floury pattern, flip the proofed ciabatta loaves over right before you transfer them into the oven.

How does it work? When you stretch the dough into the 8x10" rectangle and cut it into loaves, you do so on a generously floured surface.

Most bread recipes say lightly floured, but for this step you'll want your work surface to be generously floured. More than a light dusting but less than a complete snowfall. Like, you should still be able to tell the grass is green, but it's definitely more white than green. (In this metaphor, the grass is your counter.)

When you let the cut loaves rise, they expand slightly against the countertop and the flour gets trapped between the creases where the dough is sticky.

Right before you transfer them into the oven, flip the loaves over, revealing the swirly pattern — kind of like when you fall asleep on a creased pillow and wake up with wrinkles all over your face.

The loaves will continue expanding in the oven and all those fine lines and wrinkles on the surface of the dough will spread out, further emphasizing the swirls.

How to Keep Track of What Set of Folds You're On

I always have trouble with this too. Here's a few different methods that have worked well for me:

• Set two timers, one for 3 hours and one for 30 minutes, and just keep resetting the 30 minute timer until the 3 hour timer goes off
• Sticking a post-it on the counter, setting a timer for 30 minutes, and making a tally mark every time you complete a set of folds
• Set a timer every 30 minutes and put 6 M&Ms on the counter next to your dough. Eat one every time you complete a set of folds. When you're out of M&Ms, you're done with your folds.

📖 Recipe