Here’s another bread recipe I like, to encourage people to make their own bread. Normally, this is a bacon and onion fougasse, but what I have made here is a vegetarian variation. It’s not that I don’t love bacon, you understand. I’m just eating it less often…
The recipe is a variation on the bacon and onion fougasse recipe printed on the back of bags of Allinson’s Very Strong Bread Flour. You don’t have to have exactly that kind of flour, if you live somewhere that doesn’t have supplies of Allinson’s flour, as long as you use a strong white bread flour, this will work.
You’ll need flour, a sachet of yeast, hand-hot water, olive oil, salt, an onion, garlic (optional), sun-dried tomatoes and black olives. You’ll also need a mixing bowl, a tray to bake them on, a frying pan, and an oven to bake them in.
- Chop the onion finely, and fry it gently in a tablespoon of olive oil, along with the sun-dried tomatoes, which you should cut into thin strips, and the finely chopped garlic. When you feel they have been done enough, let them all cool.
- While the frying is going on, put 400g of flour, up to 1½ teaspoons of salt, and a 7g sachet of dried yeast in the bowl. Add 175ml of hand-hot water and 75ml of olive oil.
- Add the cooled, fried ingredients, and the chopped olives, and mix until you have a fine dough. I use a hand held mixer with two dough hooks for this. It will look like this…
- Tip the dough out onto the work surface, and knead it until it is smooth. I know, it’s rather lumpy with all those tasty ingredients in it, but just knead it until you think it looks right.
- Cut it into three or four roughly equal pieces, and shape each of them into an oval. Press them fairly flat, a couple of centimetres thick, and put them on an oiled baking tray.
- With a sharp knife, cut two long deep slashes down the centre of each piece, and then several slashes on each side, to make a leaf pattern. Here are the ones I did this morning…
- Now, cover them with oiled cling-film, and put them somewhere warm to rise. They need to double in size, more or less, and this will probably take twenty minutes to half an hour. Put the oven on to preheat while this is going on, set to 220°C, or 200°C for a fan oven.
- Here they are after rising…
- Bake your fougasses in the middle of the oven for 15 to 20 minutes. You should end up with something like these…
I forgot to tell you one of the ingredients I used! Herbs go well in this bread, and you can put them in the flour, at the beginning. These ones contain Greek oregano, which goes very well with the tomatoes and olives. You can use whatever herbs you are fond of, of course.
Fougasses go very nicely with a vegetable soup…
