My first go at fougasse, which look fab but are actually very simple. I followed Richard Bertinet’s recipe from Dough for these ones. It just involves making his basic white dough then shaping it.

His basic white dough is 10g fresh yeast rubbed into 500g strong white flour, then 10g salt mixed in, and 350g water added. Bring together the sticky dough, knead until it becomes nice and elasticky (don’t add loads of extra flour!), then rested for until doubled in volume (about two hours in my case).

Heated the oven – with baking stone – to 230C.

After the resting, I just cut the dough into four, gently stretching each piece, then cutting slits with the edge of my dough scraper. I gently opened up the slits, then carefully slid/lifted the shaped piece onto a floured, rim-less baking sheet (use peel if you have one) and slid it onto the baking stone. Baked for around 14 minutes, until starting to brown.

Oh, and the word geek in me loves the fact that fougasse is related to foccacia - both words come from focus, the Latin for hearth. As ever, some nifty factology and further explanation on Wikipedia.

This is my first stab at ciabatta, using the recipe in Richard Bertinet’s Dough.

Despite being somewhat misshapen, they turned out very tasty. But it was touch-and-go for a while there.

Bertinet’s technique here involves making a “ferment” a day earlier – basically some dough that sits around giving the yeast a chance to do its thing. It’s kinda like a junior leaven. Except the batch I made with the quantities in the recipe resulted in a pretty dry ferment (350g flour, 180g water, 1/2 t fresh yeast), which looked nothing like the nice bubbly affair picture in the book. So when it came to making the second dough (450g strong white or ’00′ flour – I did a mix; 10g yeast, 340g water, 50g olive oil, 15 salt), and combining them, it was hard going. The dry ferment and wet dough mix just refused to integrate. A lot of messy manipulation ensued.

Next time, I might experiment by just using my leaven instead of Bertinet’s ferment. It’ll make the dough even moister, but that’s good for ciabatta as I understand it from reading Dan Stevens’ recipe in the River Cottage Handbook 3: Bread.