Focaccia di Recco · Focaccia di Recco col Formaggio
Liguria · street · serves 6 · 90 min total · hard
The outlier of the focaccia family — no yeast, no rise, no dimples. Two paper-thin sheets of unleavened dough wrapped around blobs of soft stracchino, baked in a screaming oven until the top blisters and the cheese bubbles through the tears. Protected IGP since 2012 and made only in a handful of Ligurian villages around Recco — the local consortium runs sheet-thickness checks. At home it lives or dies on how thin you can stretch the dough.
Ingredients
- 300 g tipo 00 flour
- 150 ml cool water
- 50 ml extra-virgin olive oil + more for the pan and top
- 5 g fine sea salt
- 250 g stracchino (crescenza) cheese
- 1 tsp flaky sea salt for top
Method
- Mix the flour, water, olive oil, and salt to a smooth, elastic dough. Knead 5 minutes — it should be soft but not sticky. Cover and rest at room temperature for 1 hour. There is no yeast — this is unleavened dough.
- Divide the dough in two. On a lightly floured surface, roll one half as thin as you can — then stretch by hand over the backs of your fists until it is translucent, almost like strudel. The dough should be paper-thin and nearly see-through.
- Drape the sheet over a well-oiled 30 cm round pan, letting it hang over the edges.
- Dot teaspoon-sized blobs of stracchino across the surface, spaced 3–4 cm apart. Do not spread it — leave the gaps.
- Stretch the second half of dough the same way; lay it over the top. Press the two layers together around the rim to seal, then trim the overhang.
- Pinch a few random tears in the top sheet — the cheese will bubble through and brown beautifully through these.
- Drizzle olive oil over the top and scatter flaky salt.
- Bake at 270°C (520°F) — as hot as your oven goes — on the top shelf for 6–8 minutes, until the top is blistered, deeply golden, and the cheese is visibly bubbling through the tears.
- Slide out of the pan immediately. Cut into squares with scissors or a pizza wheel. Eat at once — Focaccia di Recco does not wait. It loses its magic within minutes of cooling.