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Flammkuchen

5.0

(3)

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Flammkuchen with red onions and bacon.
Photo by Maja Smend

For some time during my years at university, I played music with a teacher from the Ortenau area, near Offenburg and Strasburg. She often organized courses, and for one of those music courses we all went to a country pub. I learned that flammkuchen was in season. In the area, flammkuchen used to be only served through the time of the wine harvest. The pubs were booked weeks in advance. And once you arrived at the pub, you ordered by the square meter!

The crisp base, in combination with the simple toppings, is an incredibly sensuous match, and it is no wonder that flammkuchen (also known as tarte flambée) is now almost universally available. There are lots of recipes out there using pizza dough and different bread doughs. Other recipes that claim to be original Alsatian version use unleavened dough, and this fact makes flammkuchen incredibly quick to make.

This recipe was excerpted from 'The German Baking Book' by Jurgen Krauss. Buy the full book on Amazon.

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What you’ll need

Ingredients

Serves 6

For the dough

4 cups (500 g) bread flour
2½ oz. (75 ml) vegetable oil
1¼ cups (300 ml) water
1 tsp. salt

For the toppings

Crème fraîche or sour cream, as needed
Salt, as needed
Ground nutmeg, as needed
Black pepper, ground, as needed
Red onions, thinly sliced, as needed
Lardons (cooked bacon cubes), as needed

Preparation

  1. Step 1

    Mix all of the dough ingredients until well combined. Knead the dough until a smooth ball forms. Leave the dough to rest for at least 15 minutes before using it. Preheat the oven to the highest temperature possible, using a pizza stone if you have one.

    Step 2

    Divide the dough into portions weighing 5½ oz. (150 g) each. Roll out each portion as thinly as possible. If the dough starts to pull back and gets unwieldy, let it rest for a few minutes and move on to the next one.

    Step 3

    Transfer each flammkuchen onto a piece of parchment paper (you can do the last rolling step on parchment paper, to avoid tearing). Cover the flammkuchen base thinly with crème fraîche or sour cream and add your topping of choice. The classic is cooked bacon lardons and onions, with a seasoning of nutmeg, black pepper, and salt, but plain sour cream with nutmeg is also very tasty. (For a sweet variant, try a sprinkle of cinnamon sugar and thin apple slices.)

    Step 4

    Bake the flammkuchen for about 10 minutes in a domestic oven (or 2 minutes in a pizza oven, if you have one) until they start to get crisp around the edge. They need to be eaten immediately. The dough can be stored in an airtight container in the fridge for several days.

The German Baking Book-COVER.jpeg
Excerpted from The German Baking Book by Jürgen Krauss, Weldon Owen/Insight Editions 2023. Buy the full book from Amazon or Weldon Owen.
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Reviews (3)

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  • Disappointing dough. There are better ones out there.

    • Anonymous

    • 10/21/2023

  • Absolutely delicious. I will definitely make this again!

    • AK

    • Texas

    • 2/5/2024

  • Excellent

    • Anonymous

    • 8/30/2023

TagsCookbooksGermanEuropeanBakingDinnerLunchFlatbreadBreadBrunch

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