Rosemary or Olive Fougasse

/

Mark: Another one of Lydie Marshall’s recipes. The base recipe is a potato bread dough, onto or into which you can put anything you want. Another wonderful recipe you can make with this dough is Pissaladière: Provençal “pizza”, covered with caramelized onions, anchovies and cured black olives. We'll share the recipe in an upcoming post.

Ingredients

1 ¼ pound baking potatoes (russet)
4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
½ cup cold milk
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon active dry yeast

Rosemary fougasse:
2 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary
Coarse sea salt

Olive fougasse:
1 cup pitted niçoises or calamata olives

Instructions

NYONS Olives

  1. In a pan, cover the potatoes with cold salted water and bring to a boil. Partially cover and cook for 30 minutes or until tender.
  2. Drain the potatoes, reserving ½ cup of the potato water. Add the cold milk to the potato water. Sprinkle the yeast and sugar over it and set aside in a warm place for 15 minutes.
  3. Peel the hot potatoes, and mash or rice into a large bowl. Let them cool until just warm to the touch.
  4. If you have a bread machine, put all the ingredients in and do a dough cycle.
  5. Otherwise: Stir the yeast mixture into the mashed potatoes. Mix the flour and salt together. Gradually beat in the flour,  ¼ cup at a time.
  6. Cover the bowl, and let rise until double in size, 1-2 hours depending on room temperature.
  7. Sprinkle flour on the risen dough, and knead it for about 1 minute, adding more flour if it’s too sticky – but this dough should be pretty sticky.
  8. Preheat oven to 425F.
  9. For Olive Fougasse only, knead in olives.
  10. On floured surface, roll out to the size you want.
  11. Make two diagonal slits and spread the sides of the slit apart to make a kind of figure 8 shape.
  12. Brush with olive oil.
  13. For Rosemary Fougasse only, sprinkle on coarse sea salt and chopped fresh rosemary.
  14. Bake 15-20 minutes, until golden.