For some time during my years at university I played music with a teacher from the Ortenau area, near Offenburg and Strasburg. She often organised courses, and on one of those music courses we all went to a country pub. I learned that flammkuchen was in season. In the area, flammkuchen used to be only served through the time of the wine harvest. The pubs were booked weeks in advance. And once you arrived at the pub, you ordered by the square metre.
The crisp base, in combination with the simple toppings, is an incredibly sensuous match, and it is no wonder that flammkuchen or tarte flambee is now almost universally available. There are lots of recipes out there using pizza dough and different bread doughs. Other recipes that claim to be original Alsatian (Ortenau and Alsace are only divided by the river Rhine and have a lot of similarities) use unleavened dough, and this fact makes flammkuchen incredibly quick to make.
Serves 6
For the dough
bread flour 500g
vegetable oil 75ml
water 310ml
salt 5g
For the toppings
creme fraiche or sour cream as needed
salt as needed
ground nutmeg as needed
ground black pepper as needed
red onions thinly sliced, as needed
lardons as needed
For sweet toppings
cinnamon sugar as needed (see note, for sweet toppings)
apple slices as needed
Mix all of the dough ingredients until well combined. Knead the dough until a smooth ball forms, then leave to rest for at least 15 minutes before using it.
Preheat the oven to the highest temperature possible, using a pizza stone if you have one. Divide the dough into portions weighing 150g each. Roll each portion as thinly as possible – if the dough starts to pull back and gets unwieldy, let it rest for a few minutes and move on to the next one.
Transfer the flammkuchen on to a piece of baking paper (you can do the last rolling step on baking paper, to avoid tearing). Cover the base thinly with creme fraiche or sour cream and add your topping of choice. The classic is lardons and onions, with a seasoning of nutmeg, black pepper and salt, but plain sour cream with nutmeg is also very tasty. For a sweet variant, try a sprinkle of cinnamon sugar and thin apple slices.
Bake the flammkuchen for about 10 minutes in a domestic oven, or 2 minutes in a pizza oven, until they are crisp around the edge. They need to be eaten immediately.
The dough can be stored in an airtight container in the fridge for several days.
Note: Put 200g caster sugar and 1 tablespoon of ground cinnamon into an empty jar. Screw the lid on and shake. Store in the jar and use as directed in your chosen recipe.
From German Baking by Jürgen Krauss (Octopus, £26)
