R E C I P E S

Farinata (Chickpea Pancake from Liguria)

By Edward Behr

Once a common street food, farinata is a vast chickpea pancake, soft and floppy, baked in special heavy copper pans about a yard wide; you eat pieces with your fingers. Farinata is mainly Ligurian, but it’s made on a long stretch of the Mediterranean coast from Nice, where the name is socca, through Liguria, where in dialect it’s called fainâ, into neighboring Tuscany, where it’s cecina. You can bake a very good farinata in a home oven using a smaller pan, although the transformation of batter to bread is less remarkable than it is in the traditional wood-fired oven, whose physics produce powerful heat. It’s important that the chickpea flour taste nutty, and strongly of chickpeas. At some natural food stores, it tastes like green peas; better-quality chickpea flour is sold at some Italian and Indian food shops. Different farinata recipes call for different proportions of chickpea flour to water — for different tastes, thicknesses, or ovens. A very hot masonry oven requires a thin batter; thicker batters are for home ovens. Before cooking, you can add some chopped fresh rosemary or thyme, or green onions chopped at the last minute (if they wait half an hour, you’ll taste the difference).

 

2 cups (500 ml) cold water

1½ cups (200 gr) chickpea flour

½ teaspoon salt

excellent, fresh-tasting olive oil

 

Whisk together the water, flour, and salt, and let the combination rest for several hours while the flour absorbs the water. Heat the oven to 500° F (260° C). Skim any froth from the batter, which will remain watery. Oil a 12-inch (30-cm) diameter pizza pan with a rim, one heavy enough that it won’t easily warp. Pour in 2 tablespoons of oil and enough stirred-up batter to cover the surface less than ¼ inch (6 mm) deep. Stir to partially mix in the oil (if the batter waits before baking, stir again). Bake until golden and dark brown in spots, about 15 minutes. If necessary, finish under a broiler. Repeat with the remaining batter — oiling the pan, stirring the batter, and baking. Eat the farinata as soon as it is no longer burning hot. Makes 2.


From The Art of Eating Cookbook

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