Ask Fred Plotkin, the author of Italian cookbooks and restaurant guides, and he’ll say the most craveable food on the planet can be found in a seaside town on the sunny northwest coast of Italy.
Mr. Plotkin has eaten through all 20 regions of Italy to research restaurants, bakeries and gelato shops. (His book “Italy for the Gourmet Traveler” is a neo-classic.) But it’s a cheese-filled flatbread called focaccia col formaggio, the specialty of Recco, that receives his highest praise.
“If I knew I was eating my last meal, this focaccia would be on the menu,” Mr. Plotkin said.
Recipe: Focaccia col Formaggio (Ligurian Crisp Cheese Flatbread)
Picture focaccia col formaggio as an Italian quesadilla. Replace the tortillas with a thinner dough, then stretch it as wide as a manhole cover. Rather than something gooey in the center, this focaccia holds Crescenza cheese, which melts into a tangy cream. There’s no visual cue more validating than a fresh slice that drips milky cheese liquid.
If ever an Italian town was inextricably linked to one dish, it’s Recco to focaccia col formaggio, with three dozen restaurants and bakeries serving it in a town of 10,000 residents. Unlike more photogenic Ligurian destinations like Portofino and Cinque Terre, Recco is light on landmarks — much of it was heavily bombed in World War II. Locals decided to remake it as a gastronomic destination, showcasing its pesto, walnut sauce and an herb-stuffed ravioli called pansoti. Mr. Plotkin said Recco is now the best food town in Liguria.
Recco’s most marketable export is focaccia col formaggio, and a consortium was formed in 2005 to gain legal protection with the European Union. Only 11 restaurants and seven bakeries adhering to strict ingredient standards could label their product as “focaccia di Recco” — a quality controller pays members visits twice a year.
“The controller watches you make it, then tastes it,” said Lucio Bernini, who heads the Consortium Focaccia di Recco. “They take a piece of cheese and a quantity of olive oil to a laboratory. It’s serious.”
At bakeries like Panificio Moltedo dal 1874, locals sip bracingly strong espressos each morning alongside plates of focaccia col formaggio. On busy days, 100 focaccias emerge heaving from the oven, then quickly dispatched to the front counter where they’re sliced into wedges and served. Nearby at Manuelina, Recco’s most famous restaurant, bakers twirl dough midair with balletic fluidity to ever thinner and impressively round sheets.
Whether the focaccia comes out golden and crackly, as they do in Manuelina, or tender-crisp like the ones at Moltedo, the common thread is a delicateness in the dough and a creaminess to the cheese.
For a dish requiring five ingredients, focaccia col formaggio isn’t difficult to replicate: Roll two doughs as thin as possible, add fresh cheese, bake at a high heat. The challenge comes in buying ingredients. Though fresh Crescenza is available in U.S. supermarkets, high-quality versions are hard to find outside Italy. The same goes for Ligurian olive oil, which has a sweet herbaceousness unique to the region.
Bakers here offered similar advice: Find the right cheese or make something similar by mixing a little buttermilk into Stracchino or Taleggio, then strive for a dough no more than a millimeter thick, so thin you could stand by a window and see sunlight through. A well-hydrated and well-rested dough will help achieve this. The result, as Carol Field wrote in “The Italian Baker,” is “as elegant of a dish as Italy offers.”
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