Summer is the time of garden grill parties and you might need something to go with your meat. If you like wholegrain baked products and you want to play around a little, use our recipe to prepare a ciabatta from the wholegrain spelt flour.

We probably should not call it ciabatta, because the connoisseurs will remind us that the real ciabatta is made from white flour, ideally from hard wheat. But we have chosen this title just to give you an idea of what you are going to prepare. So get to it. You will only need a handful of ingredients but plenty of time. You will not spend it working with the dough. There will be a lot of waiting for the dough to rise. 

Knead the dough using the flour, yeast, salt and 200 ml of cold water. Gradually (by millilitres) knead in ca. 70 more ml of water. Always keep kneading until the dough starts peeling off the bowl walls, at which point you add more water. The resulting dough is extremely supple. Let it rest for a couple of minutes and in the meantime prepare a container which will fit into you fridge. It can be a food box with a lid or a low bowl covered with food wrap.

Grease the entire container with oil thoroughly (do not spare), place the dough inside, cover and put it in the fridge. After 5 minutes, remove the dough from the fridge and fold it. Grease your fingers with oil grabbing one end of the dough and pulling it up high. Fold it as if you were wrapping a gift. Repeat with the opposite end and also with the two remaining ends. Cover it and put back in the fridge. Repeat the procedure after 10 minutes. Fold the dough 3 more times like this within the following 20 minutes. Put it back into the fridge, and you do not need to care about it for the next 5-6 hours.

The cool dough needs to be tempered, so leave it at the ambient temperature once removed from the fridge. Knock it out onto a dusted rolling board after 40-60 minutes and simply form two oblong or one wider shape and fold them onto a baking tray with a sheet of baking paper. Let if finish rising for about 30 more minutes. Preheat the oven to a maximum (ca. 250 °C) and bake the ciabatta for 25-30 minutes. We recommend placing a baking pan with boiling water onto the bottom of the oven. The steam will help colour the baked product surface even in the home conditions.