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.

PÃO DE QUEIJO = Brazilian cheese bready-balls

If someone else were to put up a recipe for this dish—which is my screen name—, well, that would be embarrassing. Adri, the boyz and I discovered these little cheese balls in Brazil, where they are sort of a national food, and they fascinated us—really quite different in texture from anything I'd had before. Back home I started experimenting with method, and I ran variations of several different recipes before I settled on this. Again, my MO is not a traditional recipe. A new food is not the product of a sequence of steps but rather the outcome of some new combination of familiar and novel ingredients and (hopefully practiced) techniques. This is a great example.

The basic idea here is a pâte à choux, a.k.a. cream puff dough, except for the use of a mixture of manioc starches in place of wheat flour. Karen is a big proponent of the choux pastry, so I know she'll approve of this recipe. If you're not familiar with the technique, it's one of the most forgiving doughs on the planet, mostly because you actually want your starches to unwind with heat and become fully incorporated with the fats and other liquids. Almost impossible to screw up, you can reliably churn out impressive profiteroles without having to stress out about the dough. It's versatile, too--basically the same dough mixed with pureed raw pike is poached to make quenelles—a delicate French fish dumpling so light (when they're done right) you'd think they came from some gravity-free zone in outer space.

What makes the pão de queijo dough different is the kind of starch used. If you can't find these ingredients, forget this dish altogether (but go ahead and make profiteroles!) Use regular wheat flour for pão de queijo and the result is awful—sort of a cheese-tainted profiterole. Yuck. Here are the two critical pieces to the puzzle.



Polvilho azedo (almidón agrio in Spanish) is "soured" manioc starch. Basically the starch that is extracted from the sometimes deadly cyanogenic manioc (mandioca) root is allowed to go sour before it is dried and made into starch. This stuff has visible crystals of organic acids and smells faintly barfy. The sourness of this starch accounts for more than half of the "cheesiness" in the pão de queijo. Polvilho doce (almidón dulce) is regular manioc starch and is equivalent to tapioca starch. It's not really sweet—-the "doce" just distinguishes it from "azedo" or sour. This unsoured starch is needed to soften the acidity brought in by the polvilho azedo. I use about a 40/60 mixture of sour to regular.

Both of these starches are available through Internet sites (I rely heavily on amigofoods.com), but there may be a store selling Brazilian products store locally to where you live, and they would almost certainly have polvilho azedo and polvilho doce. Regular tapioca starch is also easily found at most Asian markets.

It's out of character for me, I know, but this time I can give approximate proportions of the dry and wet ingredients. [There are some things for which measurement saves a lot of time.] Into a saucepan goes 1 1/2 cup of "liquid," which should include about 1/3 cup of butter and the rest milk. This comes up to almost a boil and then a spot of salt and two cups of the 40/60 starch mixture goes into the pan. Yeah, the starch is a very fine powder, and you'll have a cloud of starch from this step that will settle out onto your fancy cooktop and you'll be cursing me but don't say I didn't warn you. Turning the heat down and mixing it all up vigorously the dough will soon start pulling cleanly away from the sides (if you added enough butter). Now off the fire and maybe in a mixing bowl, eggs can be added, one at a time, letting the dough get nice and smooth after each of three eggs. This part is a bigger pain in the ass than what it sounds like, unless you have one of those countertop mixers (which I don't).

Almost done now. Just have to add the cheese—finely grated pecorino romano is what I use, though traditionally you'd need a hard cheese from central Brazil. IMO, it's just got to have a sharp, cheesy flavor to complement the sour starch, and not having the Brazilian cheese (nothing special to begin with) doesn't really alter the flavor or authenticity. I throw in a nice big handful and finish the mixing with my bare hands.

At this point the dough can be piped from a pastry bag (or a heavy plastic bag with the corner cut off) or spooned or pinched by hand into domes a little flatter than half-ping-pong balls and spaced evenly on a cookie sheet lined with parchment. Then baked at 325-350°F they'll eventually (it will take more than 20 minutes) puff some and then start to brown on the bottom and maybe even have some color on top. They should be firm on the outside and they should not taste raw in the middle. If undercooked they collapse into dense blobs of undercooked dough.



This is a great afternoon snack with a cold tereré (or with hot mate, as shown in pic). If you use the plastic bag trick, you can pipe and cook one batch on day one and store the rest of the dough in the fridge for a repeat performance on day two.