Fougasse

Now I finally got around to trying something from the newly purchased bread baking book - fougasse. Even though the shape is rather rare and thus interesting, I found the way to prepare the dough much more exciting.

The recipe for the dough reads pretty standard:

500g 550 flour 10g yeast 10g salt 350g water.

As usual, everything poured together, but this time I didn’t knead it firmly by hand or machine, just stirred it through with a dough spatula.

According to the recipe, the dough, still quite sticky, should then be put on the countertop and then further processed by a folding and turning technique so that a very airy dough is formed. Did that go well? Yes, but…

The dough was indeed sticky. Sticky it remained, however, so that it was hardly possible to turn it, let alone incorporate air by folding it. So the whole thing degenerated into a stubborn battle, with the dough sticking to pretty much every utensil, person, and piece of clothing within a 2-meter radius.

Eventually, though, the dough became more stable and was indeed airy and light. The only thing was that it just wouldn’t go back into the bowl, it still stuck to the countertop.

Several turns with the dough scraper then got him to loosen at least a little.

After 1 hour, the dough was well risen. I then tipped it out of the bowl onto a “bed of flour” as it would have inevitably stuck again otherwise.

So now I was able to carefully push it apart with plenty of flour as called for to about 40*40 cm.

Then divided into 6 rectangles and made cuts in the plates with the spatula.

Finally at 250 °C in the oven on a hot tray (tricky!) and water sprayed in the oven to get a crust. Then baked at 230 °C. I took the first batch out after 7 minutes to freeze those. The recipe says you can bake them frozen like this at 180 °C in 10 minutes. Let’s see.

I baked 2 pieces for 14 minutes to be able to test at least once.result: Great! The dough loose, the crust as it should be, if you think of Ciabatta. So it depends only on the “kneading”, not on the baking method, as I always assumed. Thanks to Richard Bertinet for these hints!

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