Making Flammekueche

Some years ago, Mark and I joined a scheme called Wineshare - a "rent a vine" club enabling us to buy wine from the vineyard at bargain prices. Once a year, members would flock to a farm near Coventry, pile into coaches and head over to Calais, to meet up with lorries loaded with our wine. Our coaches accompanied the lorries back to the UK, and this entitled us to buy the wine at duty free prices. It was always a great day out but gradually the business went into decline and eventually into receivership. The vineyard itself has recently risen phoenix-like from the ashes of the old business but with a totally different structure, and the coach trips no longer take place. Which is a pity, as not only were they very sociable occasions, but they gave us a few hours in Calais to browse the market and have lunch.

Our favourite place for lunch was the Café de Paris, on the corner of the market square. Not a sophisticated fine dining establishment, just somewhere with a good selection of freshly prepared, tasty food.  Most years saw one or both of us choosing Flammekueche, an Alsatian dish very similar to a pizza but with a sour cream topping rather than a tomato and cheese one.

So when I spotted this recipe the other day, I was very keen to give it a try - and I happened to have all of the ingredients to hand - bread dough ingredients I always have, I'd just restocked on red onions, my last Ocado order had seen me treat myself to a couple of packs of French lardons and I had a pot of sour cream because I'd been planning to make a goulash.

Now I don't like to take my tech into the kitchen - I'm too messy - so I printed out the recipe and off I went. The recipe didn't have a print-friendly version option and what I didn't notice was that in printing it out, a page break had meant an important line had failed to print...... the one that said "roll out one half". I made the whole batch of dough into a single, baking-sheet-sized Flammekueche, and then wondered why my topping seemed to be so much denser than on the photo.

Nevertheless, the finished dish looked and smelled delicious - it tasted delicious too, apart from the fact the bready base was twice as thick as it ought to have been and for that reason was undercooked towards the centre! But there was still more than enough to go round and it was a very easy, tasty dish - I'll be making it again!

I'm sharing this with Bready, Steady, Go! at Utterly Scrummy Food for Families and Jen's Food.