FFWD Provencal Olive Fougasse

When this posts, we'll be in Oregon with Paul's family celebrating his grandmother's 90th birthday.  She's an incredible woman and I'm so excited to be there, but I have so much to get done before we can leave for vacation.  Luckily, for a yeast dough this was a pretty easy recipe.  On Wednesday night after work I made the dough, let it rise once, and then put it in the fridge before going to bed.  With a stand mixer, the dough was pretty easy to make.  The hardest part for me was not eating all of the olives before they made it into the dough!  In my defense, I was hungry (I wanted to get the dough rising before dinner) and I love olives. When I got home Thursday night I took the dough out of the fridge, and it had risen beautifully.

I am absolutely terrible at rolling dough into rectangular, or circular, shapes, but I did the best I could and then quickly got the dough onto my silpat.  I was nervous about cutting through my silpat so I actually used kitchen shears to cut the slits, and thought they worked great.  I didn't manage to make it look much like a leaf, but it's really taste I'm going for so I let it rise and put it in the oven.

I was on the phone when it finished baking (and running out of room in the kitchen), so I put it on drying racks on the dining room table to rest.  It shared the table with Paul's bottles - he's getting ready to bottle his beer. 

I served this with another big salad, some cheeses, and some butternut squash soup I found in the freezer.  It was excellent.  You just can't go wrong with homemade bread, and I absolutely loved the olives.  The orange and rosemary flavors were much more subtle to me, but they contributed to making this a wonderful bread.  I'm so glad I froze the second one to keep in the freezer.  We'll be looking forward to having this again!