This free ciabatta dough calculator builds a high-hydration ciabatta formula from your flour weight. Enter the flour and the tool gives water, yeast, salt, total dough, the fold count and the bulk rise time, so you can plan the famously wet, slack dough that bakes into open, holey loaves.
Ciabatta is defined by its water. At 80 percent hydration the dough is more like a thick batter than a kneadable ball, and that wetness is exactly what creates the big, irregular holes and the crisp, thin crust. Bakers who add flour to make it handleable lose the very thing that makes ciabatta special.
To use the tool, enter your numbers in the fields above and press the calculate button. The results table updates at once, and you can change any number and calculate again as often as you like. Everything runs in your browser, so nothing you enter is sent to a server, and you need no account and no sign-up.
The formula is baker percentages on flour: water at 80 percent, salt at 2 percent and instant yeast at just 0.4 percent, a total factor of 1.824. The tiny yeast amount is deliberate: a slow, three-hour bulk rise with four stretch-and-fold sessions builds flavour and strength that a fast rise cannot match.
Example: for 500 grams of flour, the tool gives 400 grams of water, 2 grams of yeast, 10 grams of salt and 912 grams of dough, with 4 folds over about 3 hours. Mix, rest 30 minutes, then fold every 30 minutes, and handle the risen dough as little as possible when you cut it into loaves.
Tip: fold instead of kneading. Wet dough cannot be kneaded on a bench, but stretch-and-fold sessions in the bowl build the same gluten network gently, and each fold traps air that becomes holes in the baked loaf.
Tip: flour the bench generously for shaping, not the dough. A well-floured surface lets you cut and move the slack dough without it sticking, while flour worked into the dough itself dries the crumb and shrinks the holes.
Tip: bake with steam or a covered tray. Ciabatta crust stays thin and crisp when the first minutes of baking are humid, so a tray of boiling water or an inverted roasting pan over the loaves helps a lot.
Common question: Can I knead ciabatta dough normally? Not really. At 80 percent hydration the dough sticks to hands and bench instead of forming a ball, so stretch-and-fold in the bowl is the practical method, and it works better than kneading for this dough.
Common question: Why does my ciabatta have small holes? The usual causes are too little water, over-handling after the bulk rise, or a dough that was degassed when shaped. Keep the water high, cut rather than punch the dough, and move it gently onto the tray.
Common question: How do I store ciabatta? Eat it the day it is baked for the best crust. For later, slice and freeze it, then toast slices straight from frozen, which brings back much of the fresh-baked crispness.
Timing and storage matter as much as the numbers. Make the dough when you have time for a slow rise and a proper bake, not rushed between other jobs, because bread rewards patience far more than speed. Store finished bread in a way that protects the crust you worked for, and reheat gently rather than microwaving it soft.
A note on accuracy: weigh your ingredients with a kitchen scale, because cup measures vary by how flour is scooped and packed, and a 10 percent flour error changes hydration enough to notice. Check your scale with a known weight now and then, and keep the same units through the whole recipe so nothing gets converted twice by mistake.
This tool is free to use as often as you like. Bookmark it, run it for every batch, and let it carry the measuring while you focus on shaping, baking and enjoying the bread itself.