Olive bread

Olive bread, made with pitted kalamata olives, is good with any full-flavored meal. It’s good with a fish stew. It’s good with roast lamb. It’s good for steak sandwiches. It’s good as toast with bacon and eggs. It’s good.

Use about 30 whole olives (picture 1, above). Drain, then dust with flour to help the olives adhere to the dough (2). Press out dough as if making pizza, then set the olives. Roll the dough into a log (3). To bake as a boule, bring the ends of the log together, pinch into a rough ball, and proof in a round floured basket. Bake 15 minutes at 475°, then about 35 minutes more at 425°. Enjoy (4).

Some people add fresh rosemary to olive bread. For me, I want one flavor at a time: in this case, olive flavor. For years it was impossible to find pitted kalamata olives. If that’s still true in your area, you can pit them yourself with a cherry pitter.

Boules

Shaping the dough into a ball creates a “boule,” which takes twice as long to bake because it is much thicker. Deep slashes before baking produced the crust pattern on the top loaf; light slashes produced the pattern behind.These loaves were raised in floured woven baskets. Shaped directly out of the fridge, they rose very little in the baskets. Not to worry — “oven spring” (the inflating of the loaf in the first 5 minutes on the hot stones in the oven) is more dramatic with boules. These loaves almost doubled.

Boules hold their shape in the oven better if their “skin” is stretched before they are put into the rising baskets. Form the dough into a ball and then five or six times pull the skin from the bottom of the ball up to the top. It makes a tight ball. (Which then deflates as soon as you slash it, but it somehow doesn’t seem to matter…)

The first several times you use baskets, it may help to flour them pretty heavily so the dough comes out onto the peel.