Alsace & the North · Starter
Flammekueche (Tarte Flambée)
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, warm spice humming through the middle, with a bitter-edged char at the rim.
Ingredients
- 250 g plain flour
- 140 ml cold water
- 20 ml rapeseed oil
- 5 g fine salt
- 200 g fromage blanc, drained 2 hours in a sieve
- 100 g thick crème fraîche
- 150 g smoked lardons
- 1 large onion, sliced paper thin
- Grated nutmeg
- Black pepper
Equipment
Rolling pin · Grater / zester
The skills inside
Charring over open flameStraining & passing through a sieve
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Work flour, water, oil and salt to a smooth dough that no longer tacks to the board, cover it, and heat a baking stone at the top of the oven at its maximum, 270C (520F) or hotter, for a full hour.
- Beat the drained fromage blanc with the crème fraîche, nutmeg and pepper until it holds a ribbon on the whisk; a loose cream floods the base.
- Roll the dough to 2 mm on a floured peel, thin enough to see your hand through, and spread the cream to within a finger of the edge.
- Scatter the raw lardons and the onion in a single sparse layer, never a heap, and slide the tart onto the stone.
- Bake 6 to 8 minutes, until the rim is blistered black in patches, the lardons have thrown their fat and the base lifts stiff and dry off the stone. 8 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Charring over open flame 31 recipes
- The surface met the fiercest heat available (flame, a broiler, or bare hot metal) with nothing between them, and it shows as true blistering and blackening rather than gentle, even browning.
- The char matches the surface’s fate: where it will be eaten, black sits in patches over deep colour with every face having had its turn, and where the skin is to be peeled away, it may go to an even black, because the char there works on the flesh below and then leaves with the skin.
- It smells of smoke and toasted surface with no acrid edge that stings the nose: acrid means it went past, and acrid does not cook out.
- Just under the char it is cooked (softened, steaming, collapsed, or puffed, whichever the dish wants) because the flame did the surface and the trapped heat did the rest.
- A taste carries the smoke without mouthfuls of ash: the black that flakes away is a seasoning, not a layer.
Where it goes wrong It was left on one face too long or held too close, so one side carbonised to ash while the rest stayed raw, and the smell turned acrid, which follows the dish through every later step and cannot be seasoned away.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Champagne: when lost, bubbles
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais, lightly chilled
- From the Taps
- Pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
The universal donors: acid, bubbles, and low tannin rescue nearly any plate: the sommelier’s honest safety net.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.