Flammkuchen - Guest Blog - Andrea

We spent a couple years living in Germany and the thing we miss most is the amazing food.  Jason will be over there for the next couple of weeks and I’m jealous.  He’s going to be eating out at our favorite restaurants every night with friends I haven’t seen in years.  He’ll call me every night and tell me how much fun he’s having and describe every last detail of his fabulous dinner. I’ll love hearing all of it and at the same time hate that I can’t be experiencing it too.  Anyway, during a recent bout of jealousy/nostalgia I decided to make one of our favorite good time foods from Germany.

Flammkuchen is a bit like a pizza.  Here is the official description from Wikipedia.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarte_flamb%C3%A9e  What I love about it is that it’s a food to eat with friends.  It’s pretty light so you eat a lot of it over the course of a few hours.  You open a bottle of wine, make a flammkuchen, eat, drink, have a good time, then make another version of flammkuchen, eat and drink some more, then make yet another one.  

Here is the official recipe:

2 cups creme fraiche
4 cups flour
2 T yeast
1 ½ cups warm water
½ t salt
thinly sliced onions
diced lardons

I live in an area where creme fraiche isn’t readily available so I have to make my own.  I start out with 2 cups of heavy cream at room temp.  I pour that into a quart size lidded jar along with 2 T plain yogurt.  That goes into the oven overnight with just the oven light on.  
(Loren says some Giant Eagle stores carry it. Medina specifically)

In the morning I wake up to a thickened cream in the oven which I then put into the fridge where it thickens up even more.  It’s basically creme fraiche at this point and can be used anytime within the next week.

The crust for the flammkuchen is made by mixing 4 cups of flour, 2 T yeast, ½ t salt and the 1 ½ cups of warm water in a bowl.  Mix it until it’s smooth and forms a decent dough.  Let it rest for about half an hour, just cover it with a damp towel or something so it doesn’t dry out too much.

Preheat the oven to 500F.  

Roll a baseball sized amount of dough out on a floured surface.  Roll it as thin as you can get it.  1/16” to as thick as about ⅛” would be perfect.  Transfer that to whatever baking pan you’ll be using.  Top the dough with some of the creme fraiche.  You don’t want to see dough through the creme fraiche.  I would say that it should be a layer about the same thickness as the dough itself.  I generally sprinkle that with salt, pepper and some dried herbs (italian blend or herbs de provence).  That’s not part of the recipe but it’s what I think tastes best.  After that, add some onion and the lardons.  Once again, I live in a rural area where lardons are hard to come by.  I usually use canadian bacon, thick sliced bacon or diced ham instead.  

That’s it, just put it in the oven for 8-10 minutes.  The dough will bubble up and turn a dark brown.  Take it out of the oven, slice it and eat it.

Now the beauty of this simple dish is how many varieties there are.  It’s like a pizza, you can do anything you want with it.  Variations my family love include making one similar to a pizza, just using tomato sauce instead of the creme fraiche.  We will also make a vegetarian one with only onions and then top it with shredded cheese.