Coca

Finally got round to buying Claudia Roden’s Food of Spain. Don’t need a new cook book but she’s too good to ignore. Especially when I heard she’d got coca recipes in it.

Coca is one of those mysterious breads that I never quite believe I have got right because I’ve never seen an authentic one. It’s not so much the dough – I usually ignore formulas in cookery books because they are all the same as the one at the back of a Delia Smith – but with flat breads I worry about how thick they should be. Just when I’d decided from Marimar Torres that they were thicker than pizza, Claudia seems to suggest they are thin – and served cold.

The dough is the usual pizza dough that had been sitting around in the fridge for at least five days. Hence the cracks you can see because the gluten had degraded.

She has you roast the peppers and aubergine whole in the oven, remove the peppers to a poly bag when they are charred continuing to cook the obo until soft. The peppers are skinned and seeded when cool then cut into small cubes along with the obo and mixed with a little olive oil. Gently fry an onion then add a couple of chopped tomatoes and a little sugar. Spread this on the dough, cover with the peppers/obo mix and bake at 180C for about 30 mins. So no pizza-like blast.

The flavours certainly developed beautifully.