Fougasse, a snack to go with beer

I have a confession to make. This is terribly hard, but here goes. When I discovered I could make rolls myself, you know, those burger buns, I thought, “You’re a god.” Making buns turned out to be so easy that I got altogether too pleased with myself. And that turned out to be a delusion. Why?

Probably because I wanted to be cleverer than I am. At my age I doubt I’m going to get any cleverer anyway. So what happened? I thought, come on, how hard can it be for me to make some other kind of bread? Doing it without a recipe seemed pretty much impossible, so I found one. Here’s what I found: yoghurt baguettes. Piece of cake, I thought.

But I had to be a smart-arse, because I really dislike fresh yeast. I prefer dried yeast. And that was that. A total balls-up, if you’ll pardon the expression. Those baguettes of mine barely rose at all, but I thought, they’ll rise in the oven. Baking time 35 minutes, they’re bound to grow a bit all snug and warm by the old radiator, so to speak. So I baked them. And I got a result.

But the only fitting comment is “I’ll bake you another one for when you get back. That one’ll be stodgy in the middle too” (minute 5).

Still, once I’d kneaded the baguette dough I had a little enthusiasm left (sadly, the dough gave no hint of the looming disaster), so I thought, why not bake two things in one go? And I got started on “fougasse”. Not because I liked the name, which I doubt I could even pronounce properly. On the same blog as before I found a recipe. With some very inviting photos.

But once again I had to be clever, you know… dried yeast. Although this time, hence the recipe below, the stuff turned out edible. Still, I don’t think it’s quite the same as the original, so I can safely call this another recipe of my own 😉 The title was originally going to be “Fougasse, or Italian bread”, but after tasting it I had to change that to “a snack to go with beer”. Now, heaven forbid you should think you need to be absolutely plastered to eat it. It’s just salty and rather hard. But edible, and in my humble opinion it’ll go perfectly with beer. A snack for a beer and the match. BTW, Chelsea play Manchester United tomorrow. I hope you know who to cheer for.

In the end, I have to admit that even though I tried to be cleverer and ended up looking dafter, the day didn’t turn out so badly on balance. Not only did I have a snack to go with beer (though I don’t really drink beer), I now know I’m unlikely to become the “god of bread”. I think I’ll stick to pizza and burger buns. It’s quite nice getting a little wiser by accident.

At a glance: 

Prep time: 10 minutes

Rising time: 60 minutes

Baking time: 15 minutes

Oven temperature: 230 degrees Celsius

Serves: 4

Calories: Italian dishes don’t have calories, they have power. Besides, chewing through this rather hard bread must burn plenty of calories (and that’s before you’ve even eaten it).

Ingredients for an interesting bread:

• 250 grams of wheat flour
• 1 teaspoon of instant yeast
• 3/4 cup of water
• 3 teaspoons of salt

Method (seriously hard work kneading this):

The recipe is ridiculously simple. I tipped or, as appropriate, poured all the ingredients into a bowl and kneaded them thoroughly into a fairly stiff dough. On the worktop I kneaded it into a firm, smooth little ball and left it in the oven to rise for an hour (if your oven doesn’t have a proving setting, cover the dough with a tea towel and leave it by the radiator).

After an hour the dough had risen a little. I divided it in half, then halved each half, so I had 4 pieces. I flattened them into roughly square shapes, made cuts here and there and stretched them into the shapes you see in the photo.

I heated the oven to 230 degrees Celsius (actually it was already hot from baking my stodgy baguettes earlier) and put in the tray with the fougasses on baking paper. I was a bit nervous about experimenting with throwing water on the oven walls, so I poured 1/3 cup of water onto the bottom of the oven. I baked the breads for about 15 minutes and set them aside to cool. The end. Enjoy!