Fougasse
Fougasse is a flat Provençal bread whose slashes are pulled open into wide holes. Every hole adds two more edges that will brown, so the bread has plenty of crisp crust and little soft crumb — the leaf or wheat-ear shape is more than decoration. There is one condition: cut right through and stretch decisively.
Your own work in that: 0 min.
- Dough 20 min
- Bulk rise 120 min
- Cutting 15 min
- Proving 45 min
- Baking (2 batches) 40 min
Step by step
0 / 7 doneMix a wet dough without kneading
Stir the flour, water, yeast and salt with a spoon until no dry flour remains, then add the oil. Do not knead — at 74% hydration the dough is far too slack to work by hand. Leave for 20 minutes.
Ingredients: 500 g strong bread flour · 370 ml water · 5 g dried yeast · 10 g salt · 40 ml olive oil
Do four folds, half an hour apart
Every 30 minutes fold the dough: with a wet hand lift an edge, pull it over the centre, turn the bowl a quarter and repeat all the way round, four times in all. Do four such sets of folds, then leave the dough covered for a further 30 minutes — 2 hours in total, during which it will rise noticeably. Folding builds gluten without kneading and keeps the large air bubbles intact.
Ingredients: 500 g strong bread flour · 370 ml water · 5 g dried yeast · 10 g salt · 40 ml olive oil
A wet hand and folding — not kneading.Add olives and rosemary at the third fold
Add the drained olives, the rosemary and the finely chopped garlic, if using, at the third fold, not at the start. Added early they would get in the way of the gluten and be crushed by every fold; added later they simply spread evenly through the dough.
Ingredients: 120 g black olives · 2 tbsp rosemary · 2 cloves garlic
Divide and flatten into 2 cm ovals
Turn the dough onto an oiled worktop and divide it into 2 pieces. Put each on its own sheet of baking paper brushed with a little oil and press it out by hand into an oval about 2 cm thick (roughly 25 × 15 cm). Do not use a rolling pin — it would squeeze out the air bubbles that took two hours to build.
Ingredients: 500 g strong bread flour · 370 ml water · 5 g dried yeast · 10 g salt · 40 ml olive oil
Cut right through to the paper
In each oval make one cut down the centre and three diagonal cuts on each side, going all the way through the dough but stopping short of the edge every time — otherwise the fougasse falls apart. Shallow cuts close up during proving and instead of a leaf you get a flat loaf with grooves in it.
Ingredients: 500 g strong bread flour · 370 ml water · 5 g dried yeast · 10 g salt · 40 ml olive oil
All the way through, until you see the paper.Pull the slashes wide open
Stretch the dough sideways, opening the cuts into clear holes 3–4 cm across. They will shrink back — stretch further than seems necessary. A closed hole is lost crust.
Ingredients: 500 g strong bread flour · 370 ml water · 5 g dried yeast · 10 g salt · 40 ml olive oil
Holes wider than seems necessary.Prove 45 minutes and bake at 240°C
Cover and leave for 45 minutes. Meanwhile heat the oven to 240°C with a baking tray inside and an empty ovenproof dish on the floor. Brush the fougasse with oil, scatter with sea salt, slide it on its paper onto the hot tray, pour a cup of boiling water into the dish below and bake 18–20 minutes. Bake the second one the same way straight after the first, keeping it covered somewhere cooler until then. Fougasse should be deep gold — pale means chewy.
Ingredients: 30 ml olive oil · 1 tsp sea salt
Before you start
Other additions
Bacon and onion, sheep's cheese with thyme, sun-dried tomato with anchovy, or simply garlic and oil. Keep to about 150 g of additions for this amount of dough — more weighs it down so much that the holes start to close.
Eat it the day it is baked
Fougasse has an enormous crust area, so it stales faster than a loaf and is best on the day it is baked. Freeze any surplus as soon as it cools and refresh for 6 minutes at 200°C.
The sweet version
Fougasse d'Aigues-Mortes is made with butter, sugar and orange blossom water, and is not cut through. It is an entirely different dough despite the shared name — do not try to combine the two recipes.
