FARINATA, with a "flip"

As a home cook, I have found that unconventional methods are sometimes needed to get a result to compare favorably with the original product. Take farinata, for instance. This is a large crepe made from chickpea flour, water, oil and salt, baked in a "real" oven, i.e, fired with wood or coal. Eaten just after it's made it's sublime. Allowed to sit for more than a few minutes it turns into a greasy doormat. Basically, this is classic street food that must be consumed within seconds of emerging from the oven. In Liguria, farinata is available during the afternoon hours only—perfect for snacking on your walk out to the beach for that p.m. session of sun and sand. In Nice they call it socca and sell it from round pans sitting atop barrels that are warmed from a coal fire inside.

If I could somehow re-create this food in my kitchen, it would be a crowning Proustian achievement—my madeleine of involuntary memory for family and friends who have walked with us through those little streets of Liguria. Or at least this is what I was shooting for when I began the farinata experiments.


Chickpea flour is the obvious starting point. On the plus side, this is an ingredient that is relatively easy to find in Middle Eastern markets, though I get mine from Italy. Now I'm pretty sure that in Liguria, the chickpea batter is just poured into the pan and baked until it's done, but no matter what I tried, the top crust was just not right. You see, the goal is a crepe that is pliable and rather soft in the middle yet crusty and crunchy on the outside—both top and bottom. In my home oven the bottom would crust up and brown well enough, but without that spectacular blast of radiant heat raining down from the dome of a real oven, the top would just never develop more than a brown bubble or two.


My "unconventional" solution involves two parts. The first is the use of a well-seasoned cast iron pan. Unlike thinner cookware, even a large cast iron pan (my largest, above, is an antique number 12 Griswold, a gift from some very dear friends) won't warp or tweak which results in a farinata of uneven thickness. Cast iron is also magic for browning and crusting anything that needs color or crunch, and farinata is definitely in this category. Focaccia and pizza are, too.

Okay so first some olive oil and then the batter (chickpea flour, water and salt) is poured into a pre-heated cast iron skillet, and then this all goes into a pre-heated 425°F oven. There should be plenty of olive oil floating to the top of the batter and if this isn't happening, add more oil.

The second trick feels almost like heresy, but I figure that if you want crust on both sides, why not flip the thing to give both faces a good period of contact with the cast iron? Well it works. After the bottom of the farinata is somewhat browned, it should be relatively easy to flip the thing, and then it goes back in the oven to let the other side crisp.

The last thing to note is that in making farinata, it's a bad thing to skimp on the olive oil, salt, and water. I nearly always make a mistake on my first batch after having not made it in a while. The water content is where I typically fall short. The farinata below, for instance, may look okay, but it's way too stiff, and though the flavor was right, it was too dry. The batter I had used here was like a rather thin pancake batter (which is way too thick for farinata—I keep forgetting!).

Notice in the image above that only a little oil seeped into the wood even where the knife pressed the farinata while it was being cut—this isn't nearly enough. The problem might seem like "not enough oil" but in reality it's "not enough water." Adding more water keeps the oil on the outside where it helps to crisp and brown the farinata. Time to try again (only with lots more water). This time the batter is really liquid (like the thickness of whole milk) and the result is…

…much better! Pliable, oily, succulent—could even be softer, but this one was really excellent.