Ciabatta

Many people are familiar with this famous Italian white bread, which is traditionally made from wheat flour and yeast. Interestingly, translated from Italian, its name literally sounds like "carpet slippers. " A distinctive feature of chiabatta is a very crunchy crust along with delicate fragrant pulp, which is characterized by large unevenly distributed porosity. The calorie content of the ciabatta is 262 kcal per hundred grams of flour product.

Since the end of the twentieth century, this type of bread has gained incredible popularity outside its gastronomic homeland - it began to be enjoyed both in Europe and the USA. There, chiabatta is most often used not only as an independent flour product, but also as the basis for the preparation of a variety of sandwiches.

In general, the most popular way to use chiabatta outside our country is the use of this bread in numerous fast food chains. There he is flavored with meat products, fresh vegetables and all sorts of savory sauces and seasonings.

It is noteworthy that the chiabatta was originally baked exclusively in Liguria, but to date, the traditional recipe for the preparation of this type of bread has spread throughout Italy and beyond. For example, in Spanish Catalonia, they bake chapata - this is the local name for ciabatta.

As for the chiabatta made in the Lake Como area, this bread is crisp, unusually light and soft, porous in texture. But chiabatta, baked in the regions of Umbria, Tuscany and Marche, can be completely different - from soft and airy bread to flour with a hard crust and rather dense flesh. In America, bread is usually preferred based on a wetter dough, which requires machine kneading and the addition of certain starters and enzymes.

There are many varieties of ciabatta, each of which depends on the recipe for the preparation of this bread. For example, a culinary product made of whole wheat flour is called ciabatta integral, which means whole ciabatta in Italian. It is not uncommon for Roman chefs to bake this airy bread with the addition of olive oil, marjoram and salt. And if you add some milk to the dough, you get chiabatta al latte, that is, bread on milk. However, whatever recipe the cook chooses, it is worth remembering that the calorie content of ciabatta is quite high due to the composition of this type of bread, in which the main ingredient is nutritious wheat flour.

Today, many restaurants bake ciabatta according to completely different recipes, so this product is not quite the same as it traditionally looks. These can be crisp cakes like pizza bases, which are seasoned with a variety of spices or fragrant bread with barely noticeable air pores - all this, although it is called the famous Italian bread, is essentially not a ciabatta.