Focaccia di Recco

A baker in Recco rests a simple dough of flour, water, oil, and salt, then pulls it over the backs of the fists until it hangs in a sheet thin enough to read newsprint through, wide enough to line a baking pan. Soft fresh cheese goes across it in loose walnut-sized lumps, a second sheet just as thin is stretched over the top, the edges are pinched shut, and small tears are torn across the surface so steam can vent. Into a fierce oven it goes, and minutes later it comes out blistered into a relief of amber bubbles, the cheese sealed inside gone liquid and faintly sour. Two layers of dough top and bottom, a filling between, and a single bite confirms each layer doing its job: this is a sandwich whose bread happens to be the thinnest pastry anyone bakes, and the filling is a cheese cooked molten inside it.

The whole thing lives or dies on the contrast the heat draws between the two states of the dough. Where a sheet rises off the pan into a blister or sits on the oiled metal, it bakes brittle and shatters; where it lies flat against the molten cheese, the fat keeps it pliant and silky. That alternation of crack and give inside one bite is the point of the bread being so thin in the first place. The cheese has to be young and quick-melting so it flows before the paper sheets can scorch, and the oven has to be ferocious, hot enough to set the structure in the few minutes before the dough dries past silky into tough. Both halves of the timing are unforgiving, and the window where they meet is narrow.

Pull a wedge and the failures show at once. Roll the sheets a shade too thick and they bake to a uniform chewy bread with no blister and no shatter, the contrast gone and the thing reading as a heavy cheese pie. Skip the vent tears and steam pockets balloon and burst, tearing the seal so the cheese floods the pan. Use a cheese with any age on it and it sets rubbery instead of flowing, leaving cold pockets where the bite wanted ooze. Let the wedge sit and cool and the blisters slump from brittle to leathery, the molten cheese stiffening to a flat chewy disappointment. The build is on a short clock from the moment it leaves the oven, which is exactly why it is cut into rough squares and eaten with the fingers straight off the pan.

Eat one hot and what rises first is scorched oiled dough and warm milk, the cheese loud under it. The blistered top is brittle against the lip and shatters with a faint crackle, then gives way where the underside has stayed silky against the filling. The cheese is molten and stringing and faintly sour, slicking the mouth and pulling in threads from the wedge to your hand. It is hot enough to be reckless with, the salt of the dough sharp against the mild sour fat of the cheese, the thin pastry near weightless where the cheese is rich. The contrast of the shattering blister and the flowing centre is over in seconds, because the whole thing cools fast, which is why nobody in Recco lets it wait.

Recco treats it as a civic possession. The town has held a Festa della focaccia in the last week of May every year since 1955, and a cluster of bakeries and restaurants there, the businesses that pulled it from a local habit into a name, still bake it to order all day. It is eaten hot off the pan standing at a counter or carried out in a paper sleeve while it is still too hot to hold flat, and the order at a Recco bakery is simply for it by the slice, the only question how big a piece. Made elsewhere the thing can still be cooked and sold, but it cannot legally call itself di Recco, a distinction the town fought for and won.

The closely related names sit within arm's reach. The full designation, focaccia di Recco col formaggio, spells the cheese out and is the formal name that travels on menus and in the register. The broader Ligurian focaccia col formaggio is the generic term for the same unleavened, cheese-sealed idea as it is baked under other town names along the coast, outside the protected zone. What this is not is ordinary Ligurian focaccia, the thick, leavened, dimpled, oil-pooled bread eaten plain at breakfast; that shares the word and nothing of the method. This one is the thin, unleavened, double-sheet cheese bake specifically.

The Thin Bread and the Register

The origin Recco tells about itself is a siege story, and it is folklore rather than record. The tale holds that during Saracen raids the coastal people fled inland and baked an emergency flatbread from the flour, oil, and cheese they had to hand, and it is repeated everywhere; it belongs to legend, not to the documentary trail, and is worth flagging as such. What the record actually shows is later and humbler: the cheese focaccia appears in Ligurian writing from the nineteenth century, and toward the end of the eighteen-hundreds a group of Recco bakers and restaurateurs turned it into a commercial draw.

Those same families organised to defend it. A consortium formed in Recco in 1997 to register the authentic name and fend off imitations baked elsewhere, the groundwork that would carry the product toward European protection. The cheese itself shifted with the rules: traditional stracchino has largely given way to crescenza, and the protected specification now calls for a fresh soft cow's-milk cheese of Ligurian origin to keep the ingredient within the zone.

The hardest single date is the registration. Focaccia di Recco col formaggio was granted protected geographical indication status on 13 January 2015, binding the name to the four coastal municipalities of Recco, Sori, Camogli, and Avegno in the province of Genoa, and to the method: the unleavened dough pulled into two thin sheets, the fresh soft cheese sealed between them, the fierce short bake. The legend wants a medieval siege; the document fixes the name to a stretch of the Ligurian coast on a winter day in 2015.