Sue’s Socca……

While having a new year clean out of my ‘in box’ this morning, I found the ‘socca’ recipe that Sue Cane, our resident coeliac and gluten-free beer expert, had sent me a few weeks ago and that I had mentioned yesterday.

In  the course of another email she had commented that she had just  munched through the tastiest ‘socca’. In response to my ‘the tastiest what?…..’ she sent me the following:

‘Socca’s a bit like farinata except thinner and with no oil. It’s great as it can double as chappati, tortilla or even pitta bread and is really quick to make.

I make quite thin ones – just gram flour and water mixed to a thin batter. I normally let the mix stand somewhere warm for a few hours but you don’t need to. Then just before cooking mix in lots of chopped parsley and a seemingly huge quantity of green chillies

Fry for a few mins then flip.

Good with curries, Mexican food and, cut into triangles, with mezze. I think they’d also be good smeared with nice oil with a poached egg. Or maybe I’m just hungry!’

So that’s how you do it….. If you want to know more about it Wikipedia says:

Farinata, socca, or cecina is a sort of thin, unleavened pancake or crêpe of chickpea flour originating in Genoa and later a typical food of the Ligurian Sea coast, from Nice to Pisa. In standard Italian, the dish is called “farinata” ‘made of flour’, in Genoese dialect fainâ. In Nice and the Côte d’Azur, it is called “socca”, and in Tuscany, “cecina” ‘made of chickpeas’. In Argentina and Uruguay it is known as fainá or faina.

While my good friend Anna del Conte (of whom more very soon….) says, in her soon-to-be-reprinted Gastronomy of Italy:

Farinata is a thick pancake made with chick pea flour. It is a speciality of Liguria. To make farinata, chick pea flour is mixed with water to a thinnish paste and then poured into a flat round tin. A goood amount of oil is mixed in and the farinata is ready for baking in a brick oven, fired by burning twigs. The farinata is ready when golden and crusty.

Farinata is hardly evener made or eaten at home: its place is in the street where it is bought from perambulating barrows while shopping at the market, or in a bar, to be eaten with a glass of white wine.

Happy socca-ing!