🇪🇸 Spain · Family: El Bocadillo y la Mesa · Region: Catalonia/Valencia · Heat: Baked · Bread: coca · Proteins: anchovy
The coca is the flatbread of Catalonia and Valencia, and it sits in this catalog as a carrier rather than a closed sandwich: a thin baked base that takes toppings the way a bocadillo takes a filling. It can be sweet or savoury, but the savoury coca is the one that belongs here, dressed across its surface with vegetables, sardines, or embutidos and eaten in slices off the board. Unlike a split loaf, the coca carries everything on one open face, so it behaves like an open-faced sandwich whose qualities are set by how thin and well-baked the base is and how the topping is distributed.
The construction is a topped flat base, and the discipline is in the proportions. A lean dough is rolled or pressed out long and thin, the savoury versions usually brushed with olive oil, then the topping is spread the full length and width so the surface is covered edge to edge rather than mounded in the middle. It bakes hot until the base is crisp and the topping is set or lightly caramelised, and it is cut into rectangular pieces to eat. Good execution keeps the base thin and properly crisp so it stays firm under its topping, dresses it generously but evenly, and lets the olive oil and the topping carry the flavour. Sloppy execution is a thick, bready, under-baked base that goes soft, a topping skewed to one end with bare dough at the other, or so heavy a load that the slice flops and the crust never crisps. The base is the bread, and a damp or doughy one cannot be rescued by what sits on top.
The variations are wide because the topping is open. Roasted vegetables, sardines or anchovies, sliced embutidos, onion, and peppers all appear, alone or combined, and the sweet coca dressed with sugar and pine nuts is a different dish entirely. The escalivada-topped form, the coca de recapte, is specific enough that it deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here, as does the question of the plain undressed base itself, the coca bread, which is treated separately. The coca in its savoury form is the open flat carrier of the eastern Mediterranean coast: judge it on a base baked thin and crisp and a topping that runs to every edge.
More from this family
Other El Bocadillo y la Mesa sandwiches in Spain: