🇪🇸 Spain · Family: Bocadillo Vegetal & de Verdura · Region: Catalonia · Heat: Baked · Bread: coca · Proteins: anchovy
The Coca de Recapte is the Catalan flatbread dressed with escalivada: a thin coca base topped with eggplant, peppers, and onions roasted until they collapse, often finished with sardines or anchovies. It is the savoury coca at its most characteristic, an open-faced thing built on smoke and roasted sweetness rather than a closed loaf, and it reads here as a flatbread sandwich whose whole identity comes from the fire under its vegetables. Where a plain coca takes whatever topping is at hand, the recapte is specifically this charred-vegetable build, and the char is what separates a good one from a flat one.
The construction is a topped flat base, and the roasting is the decisive step. Eggplant, peppers, and onions are roasted whole until the skins blister and the flesh goes soft and sweet, then peeled by hand and torn into strips, never rinsed, since rinsing washes away the smoke that is the point. That mixture is spread the full length of a thin oil-brushed coca base, the cured fish laid across it, and the whole thing baked hot until the base is crisp and the topping is set. Good execution keeps the base thin and firm under the load, drains the roasted vegetables of excess liquid so the coca stays crisp, and lets the char and the olive oil carry the flavour with the salt of the fish cutting through it. Sloppy execution is a thick bready base gone soft under wet vegetables, pale oven-steamed vegetables with no char and no depth, or so much oil and juice that the slice slumps. The base must stay crisp and the vegetables must taste of fire, or it is just oily flatbread.
The variations sit close to the build. Sardines and anchovies are the usual fish, sometimes both, sometimes neither for a purely vegetable version; some add a scatter of olives or a thread of the roasting juices. It is cut into rectangles and eaten warm or at room temperature, the smoke coming forward as it cools. The same escalivada folded into a split loaf is a different and separately treated thing, the bocadillo de escalivada, and the plain undressed coca base deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here. What makes a Coca de Recapte is genuinely charred vegetables on a crisp thin base; without the fire it falls flat, and without a firm base it collapses.
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