Real Fougasse

Being from the south of France one of my greatest disappointments about Paris is the lack of proper fougasse. There's only one boulangerie whose fougasse is slightly better than decent to me, aptly named La Fougasse on the rue de Bretagne in the Marais. All the others I've sampled in hope of finding a fougasse that would be a quick fix have been entirely in vain because yes, I am a snob when it comes to bread. And yes, I mean really, really snobby.

The truth is that lots of French boulangeries in Paris take the shortcut of serving up fougasse made with regular old baguette dough that is baked with a variety of ingredients and basted with poor quality olive oil. The key to fougasse, in the true Provencal tradition is that olive oil goes into the dough itself along with whatever garnishes you're using to make your fougasse. I looked at a great number of recipes online and let me just say, if you're adding sugar to your fougasse recipe or proofing your yeast with this same sugar and warm water, you are not making fougasse - you're making the Italian version of this bread called focaccia and while they share some similarities, the texture and taste is not the same.

What you rarely see outside of Provence is a type of sweet fougasse, which is one of the thirteen traditional desserts of an authentic Provencal Christmas known as le gros souper. These thirteen desserts are meant to represent Jesus and the twelve apostles and the desserts can vary, but I would find it a bit odd if sweet fougasse made with orange water weren't included along with the others. In my family it was an obligatoire part of les treize and it was absolutely pas d'accord to cut the fougasse with a knife (to protect oneself from financial ruin in the New Year is the superstition).

So tonight we're having dinner with our French neighbours, but I was told to cook nothing (which of course isn't polite to do) and I don't want to make anything that won't complement their meal, so I decided to make fougasse because well, honestly, there are few people who could out-fougasse me thanks to the patience of my grandmother who thought I should learn to make one of my favourite foods properly. I've been making savory fougasse for my family since I was six years old.

This is not a recipe to undertake if you don't have a mininum of 5 hours to kill. Yes, five hours. Much of that time will be spent waiting for your dough because the actually cooking only takes about 8 - 10 minutes. Make your dough as close to serving time as possible. Since we're expected at 7 o'clock I'll be pulling these out of the oven at about 6:45.

Now in terms of garnish - you can garnish savory fougasse with a lot of different vegetables, meats, cheeses, and spices but for today I've decided to make a more "modern" garnished fougasse along with the most traditional variety which is made with herbes de provence.

Since the garnished fougasse is a bit trickier, I'll focus on the process of making this style and add some notes for the traditional variety I mentioned earlier.

I've chosen to use spicy chorizo sausage, grilled red peppers, fresh sage, and mozzarella for my glitzy fougasse, all of which will need to be prepared to some extent.

The way I will list this recipe will be in terms of the time markers by hour.

Equipment:

Pastry knife or very sharp kitchen knife 
Rubber spatula 
Mixing bowls
Parchment paper
Clean dish towels
Baking sheet
Rolling pin

Mixer with bread hook can be used in place of the hand kneading technique I'll be using because I prefer the texture of the dough it gives and though exhausting, it's quite fun. 

Hour 0: 

Start the dough by mixing 165 g of bread flour with 165 ml of tepid water and 2 grams of yeast.
It will make a sort of liquid paste, which is exactly what you want. Let sit covered with a clean dish towel at room temperature for 2 hours.

Now I want to take this opportunity, from what I've seen on the Internet to explain a few things about flour and conversions.

In France there are many, many types of flour used in baking and an equally number of confusing numbers and words, etc. For this recipe you need T55 type flour, or bread flour, known in France as farine boulanger.

For conversion, which I hate to do because baking is meant to be precise and using the metric system is much better for baking, but for those of you without metric measuring cups or a scale, to calculate 165 g of bread flour = about 6 oz which = just shy of 1 3/4 c. This applies to water since the 165 ml = 165 g = just shy of 6 fluid ounces = just shy of 1 3/4 c of water.

2 grams of dry active yeast = .235 tablespoons or just shy of 3/4 tsp.

Here is a very helpful link for conversions that will be a big help for those of you switching between metric and imperial for cooking. 

Now that the dough has been started you have two hours to prepare the garnishes.

15 mins:

I've covered the dough mixture to let it sit for 2 hrs and set my alarm just in case. The peppers have been grilling at 250 degrees, halved, deseeded, but stem bit left on, and basted with olive oil for about 10 minutes. Once they start to burn up, I'll take them out, allow them to cool, and then chop them to the desired size.

I've picked about 10 leaves of sage from the balcony garden and with take out the stem of the leaf and chop them coarsely. I use about 3/4 of the chopped sage in the dough and reserve the rest to sprinkle on top after the fougasse has baked.

I'm using an actual chorizo sausage, which I like because the pieces can be as thin or thick as I like. The thickness of the chorizo is very important to the overall texture of the fougasse. I remove any casing and slice it relatively thin. Set aside.

I chop the mozzarella because I prefer the way the cheese melts during baking. I use about 50 g (1/2 c) for the baking process and then grate a little bit more to add during the last stages of baking.

Once the peppers are cooled and chopped, combine the peppers, sage, chorizo, and mozzarella with 25 ml (just over 5 tsp) of olive oil and set aside.

* Since I'm making a double batch of dough (this recipe is for one fougasse but I doubled it), I will eventually divide the dough into two portions (one portion for the chorizo mixture, the other for the traditional version).  I combine in a separate bowl 4 g (1 1/2 tsp) of herbes de provence and 3 cloves of minced garlic with 25 ml (just over 5 tsp) of olive oil and set aside to infuse.

1 hour, 10 minutes

Am now playing the waiting game.

2 hours

Take the starting dough mixture and add: 185 ml (slightly more than 3/4 c) of water, 335 grams of bread flour (just over  2 1/2 c), 1.5 g of dry active yeast (slightly more than 1/2 tsp), 10 g (1.76 tsp) fleur de sel (sea salt or kosher salt also work). When adding the yeast add to one side of the bowl and salt to the other.

*Now here is the important part.

If using a mixer with a bread hook, mix the ingredients at lowest speed for about a minute, then at highest speed for about 6 minutes. The dough should be smooth, soft, yet not too wet.

If hand kneading, the above video can explain much better than I can. Watch him carefully, how he makes sure to pull the dough over and how he turns the dough on the surface (think of your dough as a square, so four turns per rotation). This will put the right amount of air into the dough and make for an exceptional dough. It is also a great workout for your arms!

Make sure you dust your surface before hand kneading, but not excessively. The end product should be smooth looking, but full of air.

Since I've doubled this I'm going to halve the dough and then add the two different garnishes to each half and then let each dough rest in a mixing bowl for another hour.

* Now if you used chunky ingredients you might be worried that not everything has gotten into the dough. Fret not. Fret not if the olive oil has not completely absorbed into the dough either. You'll have another chance later on to incorporate everything, just let it sit because the yeast added in this step needs some time to do its thing. This isn't essential to the recipe, but it will reduce the stress of the waiting time - eat something. Relax. Your fougasse is going to be lovely. Sure you completely forgot to make sure you had the perfect bread basket for the presentation of your finished fougasse. Damn being a culinary perfectionist.

 At this point I'm tempted to take a shower, but since there is one more step involving flour, I have to resist even though I'm covered in flour.

* One thing to note. After the 1 hour wait time you'll be working towards "proofing" the dough once it's been rolled out. Proofing is basically the final step before baking for bread, where the yeast and flour begin to ferment. Much of the rising is going to happen at this point. In most bread recipes you proof the yeast with warm water and sugar before adding it to the flour, but this method does not make the best fougasse. Granted this is time consuming, but it really does give the best results. Trust me you want all that air (fou - gas(se) because it makes the softest and most delicious bread.

There are a lot of proofing techniques for various breads, but for fougasse my grandmother always put the breads on cooking sheets in the oven with a pot of boiled water. So make sure you're ready for this step before the hour is up - make sure you've got your baking sheets together (I'm using two) and that your pot of water will be boiling by the time you need to put everything in the oven to proof.


3 hours

Divide dough into 300 g pieces and shape into a ball. Place on a cutting board or parchment paper with enough room between them, and let rest covered with plastic film (I used parchment paper as I was out of plastic wrap) for 15 minutes.

Use the 15 mins to cover your baking sheets with fresh parchment

* With the double recipe I ended up with 8 balls of the pepper, chorizo, mozzarella variety dough and 4 of the herbes de provence and garlic, which means I didn't divide the dough exactly in half earlier, but it was partly because I wanted to have a little more dough for the variety with more ingredients in it.

3 hours, 15 mins

Take one of the balls and stretch it into a rectangular shape, pressing out some of the gas. Keep stretching until you have a nice rectangular shape. Use a rolling pin but make sure to not to roll out the dough thinner than 6.5 mm (1/4 inch). Using the pastry knife make the traditional cuts. These cuts are meant to make the fougasse look like a leaf from the tree of life.


Have a look on Google Images, there are lots of beautiful examples and possibilites to make your fougasse as beautiful to look at as it will be delicious to eat.

* For the pepper, chorizo, mozzarella variety you can't use the rolling pin and you can't make the cuts.

Move them to the parchment/baking sheets leaving plenty of room because they will rise and expand.

4 hours, 15 minutes

Remove all the baking sheets and the pot of water from the oven and preheat your oven to 250 degrees (C).

I started with the pepper, chorizo, and mozzarella fougasse first because they would take longer to bake. About 10 minutes in they were browning up nicely, but I wanted to baste them to get a really nice crunch, so I mixed some olive oil with salt and pepper, and baked them right under the broiler until they were nicely browned up after 5 more minutes.

For the simpler fougasse I baked them for about 8 minutes, basted them with the olive oil infused with garlic and herbes de provence (plus salt and pepper to taste) and baked them another 3 minutes.

I was running late for dinner so I didn't take time to snap any photographs, but I kept one of the simpler fougasse and then forgot to take pictures of it before I snacked on it when I got home, so sorry about the pictures. I'll update this post the next time I make it.

Here are a few pictures of the one fougasse I kept to snack on.

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This Weekend's Menu

When we'd have a lot of company at my grandmother's house often our dinner parties turned into three day weekends of non-stop eating with the day's offerings always written on an antique bistro chalkboard similar to this one (minus prices of course).

I thought about wandering around my favourite flea market in the world (and rightly so) Les Puces in Saint-Ouen north of Paris (which is still the biggest flea market in Europe), but then I realised where would I put it?

I want a chalkboard wall. Like this one to write my menus on...

It looks pretty cool right?

Thursday

Appertif/Nibbles

Fougasse aux herbs Provencal de La Maisonette des Mots*

Traditional Provencal bread with herbs from the region, special house recipe blend

Olives farcies aux anchois, saucisse de sanglier de Corse, et un assortiment de fromages régionaux

Olives stuffed with anchovies, Corsican wild boar sausage, and an assortment of local cheeses

Vin rosé - La Cave d'Augustin Florent

Rosé wine

Entrée

Velouté d'asperges garni avec huile de truffe blanche servi frais

Chilled asparagus soup garnished with white truffle oil

Plat

Gigot d'agneau rôti servi avec du miel de romarin et sauce à l'ail croustillant, pommes de terre soufflées, et la ratatouille de Juliette (la recette de ma grand-mère de Juliette)

Roasted leg of lamb with rosemary honey sauce and crispy garlic, puffed potatoes, and ratatouille (made with my grandmother Juliette's secret recipe)

Vin rouge - Chateauneuf du Pape Louis Jadot

Red wine - Chateauneuf du Pape Louis Jadot

Dessert

Clafloutis aux cerises et crème glacée à la vanille et du porto

Clafoutis with black cherries served with vanilla ice cream and aged Porto wine

If you notice I'm not serving a separate wine with the first course and it's not because I'm cheap or lazy. The reason why is because this chilled soup is meant to cleanse the palate before I serve the lamb and the wine. Chateauneuf du Pape is probably my favourite appelation of French red wines and it's meant to be served with lamb, it just is. So if someone counsels you to take a Bordeaux ask them if they have a Chateauneuf du Pape and the Louis Jadot specifically. It's a bit cheaper than a Bordeaux of the same quality and I don't think you could find the same quality Bordeaux for the price of the Jadot Chateauneuf du Pape either (though I am willing to be corrected on this).

There two more days of cooking after this massive welcome meal (whose leftovers will be packed up for a picnic) that will feature Cajun cooking and Korean BBQ. By Sunday I will most likely pass out from exhaustion, but for friends like ones who are willing to come from so far just to visit, the effort will be worth it.

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Sablès au Chocolat - Chocolate Sugar Cookies

These are a great little treat to keep round the house and are pretty fun to make as well. My grandmother used to make them to serve with coffee, and while they're quite simple, they don't seem to disappoint. Even fussy children seem to like them!

Sablès au chocolat 

Melt, 3/4 cup of good quality coccoa powder and 1 cup + 4 tablespoons butter in a double boiler until all the butter is melted.

In a separate bowl combine 2 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 cup sugar, and 1 teaspoon of vanilla.

Stir in the melted coccoa and butter mixture until the coccoa mixture is evenly distributed. Now add 1 medium sized egg. Do not overmix.

Leave this mixture in the refrigerator for at least 15 minutes to allow the butter and combined ingredients to reconstitute. Pre-heat oven to 375 (F) or 190 (C).

Form the cookie dough into 1 inch (2 cm) sized balls and roll in sugar before placing on an ungreased cookie with enough space to allow the cookies to spread during the baking process. Try to make sure the cookie balls are about the same size. Bake for 8-10 minutes or until the centers are firm.

Tips:

Keep the dough in the fridge while cookies bake.

Can be made with squares of baker's chocolate. Omit 4 tablespoons of butter if using.

I like to add a small square of milk chocolate to the top, as you can see in the photos.

Bake for 8 minutes, check the cookies, and then stay in front of the oven because if they overbake they become hard and not as yummy.

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Oh Yeah, I'm Supposed to Be Getting Ready for My Vacation!

With only one day before I leave for Amsterdam you'd think I'd be finalising my packing and doing other little chores that need doing, but the truth is I spent the entire morning tending to my tomato and pepper plants and making French onion soup or soupe à l'oignon gratinée because my pseudo-sibling D. is coming round to watch La Chienne while I'm away and because at the vide grenier on Avenue Flandres I scored six bowls for 2,00 euros!

 Mine aren't as fancy as the ones pictured above and since I won't be serving the soup until dinner you won't get to have a peek at them until then - but I posted these as an example of what not to buy if you yourself are looking to buy some bowls to serve soupe à l'oignon the traditional way. Firstly you don't need the covers because once the soup comes out of the oven it needs to be served immediately so the covers wouldn't make any sense.

What should you buy?

Your bowls need to be completely oven safe if you want to serve the soup with croutons and cheese that you melt under the broiler and should have some kind of side handles so that the bowl can be gripped by the devourer once they get to the bottom. For me the top of the soup covered with golden, bubbly cheese and the bottom are the best part, so make it easier on yourself and your guests.

Perfect.

So what makes the best possible soup? You can watch the Alton Brown video I posted below because not only is Alton Brown a fabulous chef, his show Good Eats is rather amusing as well. I quite like his recipe and his technique is beyond critique, it's just I make mine a little different.

Instead of Brown's white wine I use rosé because I just like the little something it gives to the taste. Make sure it's a dry one, slightly fruity but not too much because he's right about tannins - it kills all the efforts you've put into carmelising the onions to get their sweetness.

Now when it comes to the onions I have used mixtures of yellow, red, etc. - but any onions will do. Just make sure you have a lot of them.

I also don't add apple cider. Instead what I do is mash up an apple in a bowl, add a splash of apple cider vinegar, and let the mixture sit while my onions are carmelising. For the final taste Alton likes the Parisian way of making onion soup, which is to add a bit of cognac. I like it too but what I really love and what made my grandfather Didi actually beg me to teach him my recipe is Calvados. Calvados is an apple based liqueur considered a digestif, meaning you drink it after your meal. It is very strong so I don't use too much, but it gives my soup a little bit of robustness that I prefer to cognac.

Now here is where I personally stray from the traditional French recipes and that is I use baguette and only one slice per bowl. I toast only one side, but since I don't like my soup to have too much bread I tend to look for a baguette that is slightly smaller than the most of the bowl. It still serves its purpose for texture and to give something for the cheese to rest upon so that it can melt on the surface, but unless you have a massive mouth I find it's impossible to eat all of the bread when it's the same size as your bowl without it getting mushy and gross.

I'll post a photo of my delicious creation later, but in the meantime, if you're craving French onion soup now, here's my recipe:

Ingredients

• 5 sweet onions or a combination of onions (about 4 pounds)
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups dry rosé or white wine like chardonnay
• 1 1/4 cups beef consume (either homemade or store bought)
• 1 1/4 cups chicken or vegetable broth
• 1 large sweet apple mashed and mixed with a splash of apple cider (let stand 30+ minutes)
• Bouquet garni; thyme sprigs, bay leaf and parsley tied together with kitchen string
• 1 loaf baguette or other country stylwe bread
• Kosher salt
• Ground black pepper
• Splash of Calvados, Port, Sherry, or Cognac (optional)
• 1 cup Comte or other cheese, grated

Directions

Trim the ends off each onion then halve lengthwise. Remove peel and finely slice into half moon shapes. Add butter to a heavy soup pan. Once butter has melted add a layer of onions and sprinkle with a little salt. Repeat layering onions and salt until all onions are in the skillet. Do not try stirring until onions have sweated down for 15 to 20 minutes. After that, stir occasionally until the onions are the colour dark mahogany and have reduced to approximately 2 cups. This should take 45 minutes to 1 hour. Do not worry about the onions burning.

.
Add enough wine to cover the onions and turn heat to high, reducing the wine to a syrup consistency. Add consume, chicken broth, apple cider and bouquet garni. Reduce heat and simmer 15 to 20 minutes.

Splash with Calvados or other liqueur and simmer 2 minutes before turning off the heat.

* I usually let my soup sit for a few hours covered if not serving right away. To serve slowly bring the soup back to a slight boil and following the steps below.

Place oven rack in top 1/3 of oven and heat broiler.

Slice bread in rounds large enough to fit mouth of oven safe soup crocks. Place the slices on a baking sheet and place under broiler for 1 minute.

Season soup mixture with salt, pepper and cognac. Remove bouquet garni and ladle soup into crocks leaving one inch to the lip. Place bread round, toasted side down, on top of soup and top with grated cheese. Broil until cheese is bubbly and golden, 1 to 2 minutes.

Bon appetit!

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Pictures Worth Thousands of Calories

Potatoes baked on the grill then drizzled with garlic butter and garnished with fresh sage, parsley, rosemary, and chives from the garden. For a finishing touch I added freshly grated parmesan and served with a side of creme fraiche.

I initially planned to serve this dinner with grilled asparagus drizzled with truffle oil, but it vanished into thin air mysteriously well before dinner time never to be heard from again. I replaced it with these crisp green beans tossed with butter, tarragon, and garnished with fried shallots.

Dessert was New York style cheese cake with a Speculoos crust (those little brown cookies you get with coffees sometimes in France) and made a fresh strawberry-rhubard compote for the topping.



Whole mushrooms sauteed in gras de canard (duck fat) garnished with fresh parsley and sprinkled with sel de Guérande.



American-French fusion cote du boeuf with homemade BBQ sauce and grilled until it was so tender the meat fell off the bone. I was surprised a mass of angry French people didn't invade my garden because I cooked it until it was well done, because I'm pretty sure cooking a cote de boeuf that isn't red (bleu) or medium rare (saignant) in France is illegal. It was worth a possible prison sentence though.

I've been really enjoying the whole little house in the forest thing. It's nice being able to get away from the city. More mosquitoes though!

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Building a Spice Collection

If you're looking for jars and containers for spices or spice racks, this isn't the post for you. I have barely sorted out my problems with the spice section of my kitchen (which is basically spices shoved into old glass Bonne Maman jars or anything with a lid), so I don't think I can yet be of use to anyone in these matters, but what I can do is help you build a spice collection because it's not as easy as you think.

Another thing I should mention is that I am a multi-cuisinal (this is not a real word) cook. If you are too, then you should start by sorting out the spices you currently have according to what types of cuisines you cook. Many cuisines use the same spices for example Mexican and Indian both use a lot of cumin, fine cayenne powder, and coriander powder. There are also spices I consider cuisine indifferent like onion powder, garlic powder, salts, different types of peppercorns, and paprika.

First make a list of what cuisines you tend to cook most often.

I regularly cook:

French
Korean
Italian
Indian
Chinese
Japanese
Thai
American (Southern, New England, Cajun, Tex-Mex)

While I cook other cuisines as well such as Vietnamese, English, Malayasian, Indonesian, etc. the above list are the cuisines I cook at least 2 or 3 times a month. Being half French and half Korean, I cook these cuisines most often, but I do like to keep my meals ethnically diverse.

Once you make your list of cuisines start to think of the spices you must have in order to create your meals.

Here are my lists:

French:
Rosemary
Bay leaves
Thyme (Thyme Flowers)
Marjoram
Tarragon
Basil
Lavander
Chervil (which looks like parsley but has a bit of anise taste to it)
Sage
Cumin (for duck a l'orange)
Mint
Cloves
Nutmeg (for red meat and desserts)
Saffron
Cardamon (desserts)
Cinnamon
Fennel

Korean:

Now Korean is more complicated because very few dried spices are used in Korean cooking. This doesn't mean you don't need a lot of space in your refrigerator or on your counter for the basics. You cannot and I mean cannot cook Korean cuisine without soy sauce, sesame seed oil, cayenne pepper (both finely ground and crushed), soybean paste (called gangjang), red pepper paste (called gochujang), sesame seeds (both white and black), garlic, green onions, ginger, and lots of flavoured vinegars.

You also need one off things that make all the difference in Korean cooking like brine shrimp, sea salt, anchovy powder, dried chestnuts or chestnut powder, and fish sauce.

Italian:

Basil
Garlic
Pepper
Saffron
Coriander (seeds)
Oregano
Borage (a bit like cucumber)
Ginger (used only in southern Italy)
Nutmeg
Bay Leaves
Fennel
Juniper
Majoram
Myrtle (used in Sardinia)
Parsley (flat leafed)
Rosemary
Sage

Now without listing all of the spices for all the cooking I do, you can already see where spices crossover between two cuisines, in this instance French and Italian. The best way to build a spice collection is to not only know what spices are used in multiple cuisines you cook, but also which ones are rather rare.

In Indian cooking you can't make aloo gobi without mango powder or garam masala. In Cajun cooking you need to have file powder or your gumbos won't thicken properly (and remember you serve file at the table, do not add it to directly to your pot of gumbo! I was severely chastised by a lady in New Orleans for telling her I added it directly to my gumbo and promised I would never do it again). In Mexican cooking a lot of spices from Indian cooking are also used, but you can't make proper Mexican food without all the various peppers used in Mexican cuisine like jalapenos, poblanos, and chipotles.

Once you make your list save yourself a bit of money by buying the most often used spices in bulk either at the grocery store or if you live in Paris at the Indian shops either at La Chapelle (Metro Line 2) or rue Saint-Denis (Metro Line 7,8.9). They're not only cheaper, but you can buy in bulk. I buy bay leaves at the Indian shops for example because I can have 250g for 2,00 euros whereas at a French supermarket 40g will cost me about 3,00 euros.

The good news about either building your spice collection or building from your existing collection (I counted and I have almost 100 different types of spices) is that it can also help you experiment.

I make Indian Tex-Mex for example where I switch up a few things by using nan instead of tortillas and make raita with sour cream instead of yogurt and instead of beef curry I make Mexican style carne guisada (beef stew). I also make fusion French-Korean food where I add a bit of gochujang or encrust pork tenderloin in roasted sesame seeds and make a ginger-wine sauce. With the right spice collection, anything and everything is possible.

Of course having almost 100 different types of spices takes up room and isn't always easy to manage, but take a page from cooking shows. Measure your spices out into tiny little glass bowls beforehand and the searching through everything becomes less of a nuisance because it's annoying to have to search for something when you're at a crucial point in cooking.

Plus, while I might not have a beautiful spice rack, I have given up aesthetics for practicality and for the environment. I never throw away any glass jar, not even olive oil bottles because I reuse everything. I simply wait until I have a fair amount of bottles to de-label, fill the sink up with hot water, let them soak, and once they're clean and label free I store them until I need them. It also means that when a bottle breaks or cracks I haven't lost whatever money I invested in spice jars because I simply need to finish up the mustard to replace it.

Be aware that dried spices do lose their freshness, especially when exposed to sunlight and humidity, and should be thrown out after about a year. Also, do some research because certain spices shouldn't be kept next to each other on a spice rack unless the containers are airtight. I learned this lesson when I kept my asofetida next to my garlic powder. It was not tasty as asofetida is foul until added to food and everything I added garlic powder to didn't turn out quite right.

What unusual spices do you have in your spice collection? Mine would probably have to be the powdered galangal I bought in Holland because it's very hard to find in France. I've used it to make a curry rub for a roasted chicken with great success. I love it's subtle flavour that is similar to ginger, but still has a little extra omph.

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