Who You Callin' A Fougasse?



According to the unimpeachable source that is Wikipedia (snarky, me…why ever would you think so….?), “fougasse” is defined as follows:  “In French cuisine, fougasse is a type of bread typically associated with Provence but found (with variations) in other regions. Some versions are sculpted or slashed into a pattern resembling an ear of wheat”.

Well.  Aren’t you glad you asked?  I know *I* sure am.

What that definition, accurate though it may be (technically) doesn’t tell you is that fougasse is damn tasty, and damn easy to make, even if the recipe tells you the dough is going to be more of a batter than a dough, and will be very soft and sticky and stretchy and clingy (sort of like a couple of dogs I know, well, the soft and clingy part at least….) and you’ll have a hard time shaping it into anything that resembles a loaf of flatbread that has a “pattern resembling an ear of wheat”.

Phew.  I even lost my self there in that ramble.  Sorry about that.

All that was my attempt to explain why it took me so damn long to make this recipe (I’d originally clipped a version of it from the November 2009 "Bon Appétit").  The recipe, by Dorie Greenspan, whom I love, read as though you needed to be a Ph.D. in bread baking to make the thing.  And I’m not, not by a long shot.  But it sounded SOOOOOOO GOOD !  I mean, black olives, rosemary and a hint of orange zest, in a crispy, yeasty flatbread.  Sounds like seriously good eats to me.  And so the recipe kept calling to me, and calling to me, and calling to me, and finally I broke down and decided to give it a try.

What’s the worst that could happen?  I waste a morning in the little kitchen and some ingredients.  Nothing I’ve not done before on manys an occasion (ohhhhhh, you’ll be seeing a real splendid failure coming up in the near future.  It was a doozy.)  And if it worked….well, I’d have a nice loaf of bread to nibble on, and that’s always a plus.

And, like most things that I’ve “pulled on my big girl pants” to try recently, it wasn’t all that hard.  And it wasn’t that difficult (at all) to make a pretty respectably shaped and slashed fougasse.

One that had a flavor that was out of this world.

What We Won’t Make For Ourselves (but should)

If, as I, you are usually cooking for just yourself, or one other person, there are a lot of dishes that are “Too Much Trouble To Make”.  Or…”Too Fussy For *Just* Me”.  Or…”Too Fancy For Everyday”.

You know those dishes, we all do.  We look longingly at the recipes for gazpachos and paellas and soufflés and such and think “next time I have people over, I’m doing this !”  Or, maybe someday I’ll throw a party and make that !

But we never get around to those dishes, or those occasions.  We throw the party, and people clamor for our lasagna, green salad and garlic bread.  We have those people over, and they want our hot dogs stuffed with salsa and wrapped in cornbread.  We hold off on that crown roast of pork or truffled pasta for a “special occasion” and when that occasion hits (new job, new house, new significant other, new baby, fuzzy *or* human), we go out for drinks and dinner.

And so the dishes that are “Too Much Trouble To Make”, or “Too Fussy For Just Me”, or “Too Fancy For Everyday” fall by the wayside.  And they shouldn’t.

I’m here to tell you that most of them (well OK, the crown roast of pork probably isn’t really such a winning option for one person), but MOST of them, are not only ultimately doable for one, but totally doable most nights, and can turn the average OK day into something special.

Actually something VERY special.

My Big, Fat Mexican Dinner

A few weeks back, I did a belated birthday dinner for one of my closest friends.  When I have friends over, it’s usually ALWAYS cook’s choice.  Its my chance to try out new stuff, revisit old favorites, play with new techniques and flavors and, most especially, make those*big ticket* high yield dishes like stews and braises and baked pastas and so on that I normally don’t make just for myself.  That pesty leftover issue, you know (plus the fact I don’t want to have dogs that weigh 300 pounds, because *THEY* would gladly relieve me of my leftover burden).

That changes for Birthday Dinners.  If I’m cooking for you for your birthday, you get to choose the entire menu.  Them’s the rules.  It’s your day, it’s all about you, not me (for once, because usually it IS all about me, all the time, which probably explains a lot, actually…).  Or, when it’s not all about me, it’s all about Rosie.  That Princess thing she’s got goin’ on.  Unless it's your birthday, then it's all about you.  Clear?

So, when presented with the “what do you want me to cook for you for your birthday?” question, Lupe chose Mexican.  Yes, Lupe.  Yes, she’s Mexican.  Talk about performance anxiety !

When I said, “anything in particular…” she said no, but Mexican was it.  OK, so the rules bent a bit, since I still got to choose the particulars.  We were all happy.  I got to play; Lupe got what she wanted for her celebratory feast.

What shook out was pretty damned good, too, especially for a Polish girl from Chicago.  We had carnitas, with two homemade salsas, homemade refried beans, red rice and homemade corn tortillas.  For dessert, we veered away a bit  (OK, a LOT) from Mexico, because I was looking for something light and tangy, since I figured the meal would be a bit on the, shall we say, rich side.  The carnitas, salsas, beans and rice were new recipes (well, new for me to use, they actually came from an 8-year old "Bon Appétit" and have been waiting in the wings ever since….).  The tortillas are my standard, and the dessert I’d made once before and loved.

WARNING:  This is going to be a long, long, looooooooooong, picture intensive post.  But I will give you the complete recipes for everything at the end.  And just so's ya knows, one of the projects I’m working on, and trying to figure out how to accomplish, is to have a separate page with a sorted list of the recipes I’ve posted.  The links will click you back to the original post with the recipe.  I know how annoyed *I* get when I’m blog cruising, and find a great recipe, and have to cut and paste in 45 different steps to get it so I can print it and use it.  But that’s in the Future Machine right now.  So bear with me, there are a couple of gems in here.

Oh, and we had cilantro slaw too, but that won’t be covered here, since we’ve talked about it before.  Basically, shredded cabbage, chopped cucumber, chopped onion and chopped cilantro, dressed with olive oil, lime juice and minced garlic.  It’s good !

Onward to La Fiesta En La Cocina Pequeña!

Anybody Want Some Warm, Soft, Fresh and Fluffy Buns?

A few days ago, I emerged from a run of not cooking (I’d done a HUGE Mexican-inspired feast we’ll see in a few days, and I was tired….really tired…) to find I had some really nice knockwurst in my refrigerator, for which I’d thoughtfully bought some jarred sauerkraut.

Since I still wasn’t mentally (or physically) up to a full-blown cooking extravaganz-o, I figured that was a good start on a dinner that night.  I was going to slowly and gingerly futz around in the little kitchen that day anyway (“futz”, yet another highly technical term from me….hope you’re keeping count), doing some other simple tasks, so I’d be close to the “hearth” all day, and I figured why don’t I throw together some bread, too?

Buns, hot dog (or hottie dawg) buns seemed to fit the bill.  They could be made fairly quickly, they were low stress, they worked with the nice, plump knockwursts and ‘kraut to make krautie dawgs, and, well, it’d been more than a week since I’d made bread, and I was jonesing for the smell of yeast and bread of some ilk browning in my oven.

So, hottie dawg buns it was.  I’d toyed with the idea of making hot dog buns (or hamburger buns, same recipe, different shape) a couple of times before, and for some reason always thought……nah….the stuff from the store’s just fine.

No.  It’s not fine.  Homemade’s better.

The Most Delectable Sweet Treat You've Probably Never Heard Of

So….what the heck is that fuhnk-ay lookin’ thing??

Why, glad you asked.  It’s a silicone canelé mold.

What’s a canelé?

Why, glad you asked that as well.

A canelé (or alternatively, a cannelé) (pronounced KAH-nuh-lay), is an absurdly delicious, incredibly rich, creamy yet crispy, custardy yet caramelized, sadly ephemeral “cookie” (or really, I think, but what do I know, more of a tiny, tea-cake type creature) that are originally from the Bordeaux region of France.  Canelés can be eaten for tea, for breakfast, as a dessert, a snack, or what I think is most intriguing….as a nibble with a cocktail or an aperitif wine!  I can so totally see that.

They are typically baked in a tin-lined copper mold, the interior of which is coated with bee’s wax to allow the canelé to slip out.  The batter is essentially a rich crêpe batter, but heavy with sugar, which causes the caramelization of the exterior (which gives you the lovely, crust effect), and without the bee’s wax, you could never remove the canelé from the mold.

Actually, even WITH the bee’s wax, removing the canelé from the mold is a crap shoot.  Thankfully, the culinary gods have given us silicone molds.  Those babies make it a snap to make canelés, and get what the French have coveted for a century or so.

I first heard about canelés on a culinary chat board site I frequent, the eGullet Society Forums.  You’ll also find a link to the main page over to the right.  It’s a cool site, and if you’re not familiar with it, you should check it out.  It’s got a wealth of information from a lot of people who really know their stuff.  At any rate, a while back there was an entire, fairly long, discussion thread about canelés.  And they sure sounded intriguing to me.  Seriously, what’s not to like about a little, two-bite sized nibble of eggy, sugary, custardy goodness, surrounded by that caramelized sugar crust?

Well, except for that whole bee’s wax coated mold and sticking thing.

My Long Love Affair With Indian Food

I want to go on record RIGHT NOW as saying Indian food, in all of its iterations, in all of its regional variations, in all of its incarnations, is my absolute, drop-dead, stop-everything, hold-the-presses favorite cuisine.

Well…..OK.  Except for maybe Thai.  Or Mexican.  Or Chinese.  Or Cajun/Creole.  Or Vietnamese.  Or Italian.  Or Middle-Eastern.  Or Greek.  Well, you get the drift.

But Indian is really, really, REALLY close to the top.

The fact of the matter is I like Indian food a lot.  A lot.  A whole lot.  I love Moghul food.  I love vindaloos.  I love biriyanis.  I love tandoor-cooked food, like chicken tikka and lamb kebabs.  I love Punjabi food, and Keralan food and Goan food.  I just love Indian food.  From all the ethnic and religious influences and differences comes a marvelous abundance of styles of cooking, flavors and play of spices I don’t think you’ll find in many other “national” cuisines.  Almost every time I eat “Indian” food (and with such a culturally and ethnically and religiously diverse land, it’s almost hard to classify it as a singular cuisine), I am amazed and delighted by the range of flavors presented on my plate.  Indian cooks have such a talent in using spices to bring depth and complexity to their food, I’m in awe with every bite.

I first fell in love with Indian food a bazillion years ago.  I was working for a small biotech company whose owner was Indian, from what region, I sadly never bothered to learn (what can I say, I was a snot-nosed, know-it-all-straight-out-of-college jerk who had no use for “old” folks).  His wife, who was Swedish (an *interesting* relationship to say the least) was an outstanding cook, and also worked at the company.  The chief chemist was also Indian (again, from what region I have no clue…my loss).  Eventually, his wife, who was also from India and a strict vegetarian, also came to work for us.  She too, was an amazing cook…totally from the soul, and totally without recipes.

By that time, my boss had taken my co-worker and me to several “thank-you” lunches at his favorite, local Indian dives.  In the area where the company was located, there was a large number of Indian immigrants.  The first time he took my cohort and me to an Indian lunch, we were a bit…skeptical.  After all, she was from Te-jas, and I was from SoCal.  This was truly foreign territory for us.  But as soon as we smelled the smells, and tasted the naan, and ate the food…..the sputtering tandoori chicken, like the most exotic fajitas you ever ate, and the luxurious pilaf and the creamy dal and the cool, soothing raita, we were hooked.

And then The Swedish Wife and The Indian Wife would bring leftover food in from home for their lunches, and when my counterpart (Hi Judi !) and I would go up to the lunch room, we’d literally be salivating, with our eyeballs rotating around in our heads like a cartoon character over the smells coming from the microwave.   And we’d beg for any small, minute, scanty little sample we could score.

Eventually The Swedish Wife and The Indian Wife both took pity on us greenhorns, and started bringing us lunch on a fairly regular basis.  And those were some of the most spectacular lunches I had in way, too many years of being a working stiff.

Thus began my long love affair with the cuisines of India.

The Continuing Evolution of The "Baker"

As I think I’ve mentioned before, this whole journey towards becoming “a baker” is a relatively new chapter of my life.  I’ve been cooking for a long time.  A LONG time.  A very LONG time.  Since dirt was young, if you want to know the truth.  But it wasn’t really until about 4 or 5 years ago that I seriously decided to teach myself to bake.  I’d tried before.  When I was young and snot-nosed and cocky.  And I’d failed pretty spectacularly.  Baking wasn’t something I learned at Granny’s (or Mom’s knee).  Granny, unfortunately, had passed by the time I was 6 months old (otherwise, I’m sure I’d have learned how to make paczki….a long, sorry story perhaps I’ll share one day).  Mom was a great cook, but no baker she.  Cakes were from a box, pies from the freezer.  Bread from the MegaMarts or, back in the day, a real, live, Mom&Pop bakery (pause for a small *sniffff* for corner bakeries, of which there are NONE in my ‘hood).  She did bake a mean cookie, but everything else involving flour, ehhhh, not so much.

And so I thought it was hereditary.  My failure to bake, that is.  At some point, though, I dug in my heels (stubborn, moi??? Why ever would you think so???) and said, possibly channeling Scahhhlettt, “as God is my witness, I *WILL* learn to bake”!!

Or something like that.

In the short amount of time I’ve been serious about “baking”, especially yeasted doughs, I am continually amazed by how much BETTER I’ve gotten at the process.  Not that I’m a superstar yet, far from it.  The folks at Poilane (note that there should be one of those cutesy little "^"s above the "a" in Poilane, but it wouldn't take in inserting the link...) in Paris got nothing to worry about from me.  But I have gotten noticeably, appreciably better.  And I have fewer problems handling “difficult” doughs.  Doughs which, 4 or 5 years ago, consistently ate my lunch and caused me to tear out my hair, rend my clothes and cry bitter tears of frustration.

Doughs much like this one.