"Provence" news and stories

Fougasse is a bread traditionally associated with the Provence region of France, and it's a cousin to the Italian focaccia. Both breads are descended from a Roman bread that was baked directly on the hearth, which in Latin is called 'focus.' The Roman bread was called panis focacius, so it's easy to see the relationships, etymologically speaking. Apparently, fougasse was traditionally used to gauge the hearth temperature, which was determined based on how long it took to bake. Leave it to the French to make a very tasty bread out of a tester loaf.

This is definitely a bread that benefits from a baking or pizza stone in your oven. It needs that immediate heat from the hearth/stone to get proper oven spring. It's also a pretty wet dough, so you can expect it to be very sticky and it'll require a fold halfway through the fermentation. The only thing I changed from the original recipe was that I used kalamata olives rather than the niçoise olives, which would be the more Provencal of the two. You could also add some herbes de Provence or some anchovies, as well as goat cheese and dried fruit.

If you really want to impress your friends and family, make some fougasse. I made this last week and the first loaf was gone within ten minutes of it being cool enough to eat. Check out the gallery below, and the recipe is after the jump.

Patricia Wells is an American who lives, writes and cooks in France and has become somewhat of a modern authority on French home cooking. Some of her other cookbooks are more generally French, but in The Provence Cookbook, she focuses on the area in which she and her husband reside.

You may have caught Ms. Wells on TV a time or two, as I know that she has been a guest on the Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten's Food Network show. If so, you might have noticed that she seems friendly, straightforward and down-to-earth, a bit more so than her friend Ina, and that personality carries over into her writing. Her recipes are reliable, detailed and to the point. There are many practical tips on preparations and techniques included, too. She also takes the reader on short digressions into her favorite products and places in Provence throughout the text, which gives you a feeling that you've been there by the time you've finished. It also makes up for the lack of illustrations in the book, which would have been a nice inclusion but isn't really a crucial element of a good cookbook.

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Alas, I'm not in Provence this summer but at least I can drink the wine. The Saint Roch is a rosé table wine from the region. It has a beautiful peachy rosé color and a very refreshing quality but there's something curiously flat about it. It had no real discernable nose and more of a lightly acid quality than anything distinctly fruit-based. It's a dry wine without a hint of the cloying sweetness that can sometimes cripple a good rosé. In contrast to last week's California rosé this one has far less of a rounded flavor and yet I think I like it better, it's almost citrusy in quality. Chill it super cold and it's as satisfying as an icy Corona on a warm afternoon. I found it at Gelson's but haven't been able to locate a web source yet.

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