Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man blunders his way through butchers, bakers, and candle-stick makers (which I have just realized, there is literally one of each of those on the street I work on.) to get food to you…the information-takers. I don’t know why I feel a compulsion to rhyme this section every time. Anywho, we’re making a (theoretically) pretty easy flatbread today, so if you want to skip the details on how I embarrassed myself, here’s the link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

An Emotional Excuse/Apology

So, I just want to note on the outset that, as you may have read from our Facebook post, we did tragically lose another chicken this weekend: Mary had, unbeknownst to my mother and brother, become eggbound at some juncture last week. Unfortunately I assumed/hoped it was only Friday, and so didn’t make a big fuss over handling it Friday night, as I had just returned home, and Nate and I had just finished a play. Meaning when I went to bring her in and get her an Epsom salt bath on Saturday morning, she passed away mere minutes after being brought into the house.

Maybe I need to stop taking pictures of the chickens up near my face. It seems to go poorly.

Would she have recovered if I’d acted the night before, or right when I got up? We can’t know. And it’s a development I didn’t really have a lot of time to let affect me, as my weekend and week are more than a little packed with stuff. Which is all to establish that I hope you’ll excuse me if I get a little snippy, or my research turns out to be a little thin on the post, and to add a touch more gravitas to the point that I didn’t INTEND to make flatbread recipes 2 weeks in a row: I have had a tab with the recipe that inspired this post open since before Memorial Day. I bought the flour for this…probably over a month ago. I saw this recipe, and said “that sounds like something I can cook in Leavenworth”…And then spent several weeks not cooking things in Leavenworth.

So now here we are, and I need to give y’all something, so today I hopped in the car, came back to Leavenworth, got loaded out of the car and into the basement, and then popped upstairs and made a mess. But we’ll get to that in a second. First, let’s get some background.

Ceci, Do You Love Me?

I don’t want to know how long it’s been since that dance trend was a thing. I feel like it was pre-Trump. (Oh, only 2018? That’s not nearly as bad as I thought.)

Is Drake still a thing? I feel like 2018 was the last time I heard about him.

Also, that Title may have given you a hint of where we’re going with this, because we’ve referenced ceci before: It’s Italian for Chickpea. And while the name I learned it under was Socca, in reference to the version made in Nice, the dish is called several things, as it’s served all around the Ligurian Sea, a pretentious little bay of the Mediterranean where France meets Italy. You can find the dish there as farinata, torta de ceci, or cecina, Italian immigrants also brought it to Argentina and Uruguay, where it’s called faine. Most of the names are pretty straight-forward, and when broken down, really lay out exactly what you’re getting: Farinata means “made of flour”, torta de ceci means “chickpea cake”, cecina means “the thing made of chickpeas”. I would tell you what socca means, but the French DON’T KNOW.

In France’s defense, they have made a BRAND out of indifference/ignorance.

Technically, they have a couple guesses, but they’re unsure. Indeed, another unknown component is where it comes from: history has the earliest records coming from Genoa, but there’s no origin story. It’s believed, given the nature of the dish and how it’s made, that it was made by Roman soldiers in the region one day.

What is that nature? Well, the names tell you it’s made of flour, chickpeas, and it’s a cake. So what do you think? If you really need help, go read the post title. Yes, this is a flatbread, with a lot of variations that mostly just come down to thickness. Like, this could be a 2 mm thick crepe, or something closer to an American-style pancake.

Question: Does Jon know what pancakes look like?

Ours is going to lean more towards the latter. How do you make it? Well, I assure you, it’s no walk in the park.

Sitting in the Park

Because a walk in the park is too HARD to describe the first half of this recipe! See, the recipe I’ve had open for weeks I picked because it was so simple: make a batter, let it sit for 30 minutes, preheat a pan, cook for 8 minutes. Boom boom boom. Easy breezy beautiful glider squirrel.

That’s…not how that song goes.

Which is actually part of the reason I haven’t been making it: the recipe calls for a 10 minute preheat of the oven at 450, and 8 minutes of cooking, which is a LOT of residual heat to pour into a house when it’s 113 outside. I figured I’d wait for the heatwave to die down first. Then, I discovered that my damn nearsighted eyes had betrayed me: it turns out the dark handle of what I thought to be a cast iron pan in the back of Joe’s pantry was just a weirdly shaped NORMAL skillet handle. And none of the oven-safe pans were clean. A discovery I made AFTER I had mixed together the “batter” to sit for 30 minutes.

In this crazy mixed up batter, who knows what we do?

Thus, I was left with two options: improvise, or run to Safeway, buy a cast-iron pan, and get back in under 30 minutes. I went with Improvise, because even if I got the pan, the POINT is the non-stick nature of the seasoned cast-iron, so a brand-new one would be middling at best. So I, and I DOUBLE SWEAR this wasn’t intentional….I had to go back to Milk Street Tuesday Nights. Yeah, they have a Socca recipe in it as well. So I took my pre-made batter, bastardized it a little, and tried to use their methodology. And the results…well, the FIRST batch was a real damn catastrophe.

Like, we partially melted our own deck a month or so ago, but this was probably the worst food I’ve made for the site in months if not years. Which, honestly, is kind of impressive, because other than being a structural shit-show, it honestly wasn’t all that bad. There was a weird thing where the edges were clearly like, partially rendering, almost like I was frying cheese.

Bit of a weird ref, but one I’m intensely familiar with.

And when I moved it, it instantly crumbled and flaked. Indeed, what ended up on the plate was functionally a crumbled mess of toasted edges and crumbs. But hit with some extra salt, and sprinkled with Za’atar, I thought it would be like, a good crouton or bread topping. Incensed at this betrayal, I added an extra quarter cup of water or so, and a extra-tablespoon or so of fat to the batter. Because honestly, I really felt like the 1:1 ratio the first recipe gave me turned out more of a “dough” than a batter. A spritz of pam, and the new batter was poured in, and about 2 minutes later, flipped to much sturdier results. If anything, my big problem was that I didn’t have a spatula large enough to flip it easily with. Which led to me trying the ever-respected pan flip method…which inadvertently folded my socca omelet style.

This somehow looks like cornbread eggs.

However, a little extra cooking for the added thickness, another toss just to be safe, and within a few minutes, I had a newly cooked and seasoned slab of socca to taste. Now, a couple dietary things: this dish is vegan, gluten-free, and can be served, according to my sources, at a wide array of meals: You can drizzle it with honey (or another syrup) as a breakfast option, you can season it with a variety of spices like za’atar or harissa. You can top it with an egg, or a salad, like the Rosti. The Socca serves as a kind of neutral backbone: it’s a protein-rich bread, essentially.

Join me for other dumb statements, and pictures where the oil reflections make it look weirdly grainy.

And the result was…basically exactly that. The original recipe I used, in my personal opinion, vastly underplayed the salt/savory nature. It tasted like chickpea flour, which meant it tasted kind of like if you made bread out of hummus. Indeed, with the texture of the paste, it kind of felt like if you tried searing hummus. Joe and I both liked it well enough, though I think it could be better seasoned internally (but I suppose too strong and the savory options aren’t available.

Anywho, I think I’ve tweaked the proportions correctly so that your batch should come out closer to my second batch than my first, but it’s hard to know. Be sure (and ready) to balance the water/flour balance.

THURSDAY: IT’S SENSATIONAL!

MONDAY: I MIGHT HAVE TO DELAY THIS ONE AS WELL.

Recipe

Socca

Serves 2=4

Ingredients

1 cup chickpea flour

1 1/3 cup water

1 tsp kosher salt

2 tbsp olive oil

Oil for the pan

Toppings: 1 tbsp za’atar, 1 tbsp honey, 2 tbsp olive oil

Preparation

1. Stir the flour, water, salt and oil together in a medium bowl, to form a somewhat thick batter. Let rest for 30 minutes.

2. Preheat a wide skillet over medium high heat. Coat with oil, and pour ½ the batter into the pan, tilting and lightly shaking the pan to spread the batter. Cook for 2-3 minutes, flip, and cook another 2 minutes or so, until both sides are spotted brown.

3. Move to a plate, and while warm, dress with toppings, and serve.