Socca
A chickpea flour pancake most strongly identified with Nice, with Monaco sharing the same Riviera culinary zone and commonly serving it too. A close cousin, farinata, exists across the Ligurian coast in Genoa, Italy — the same base concept converging from the same coastal culture. Two competing origin legends exist, one about Roman soldiers improvising on shields as griddles, another about a wartime siege forcing residents to survive on chickpea flour and olive oil — neither is verified, worth treating as folklore rather than fact. Real socca is cooked on a large tinned-copper pan in a very hot wood-fired oven for a thin, blistered, charred pancake; a cast-iron skillet under a hot broiler is the realistic home approximation, and it's traditionally torn by hand into rough pieces, not sliced.
Ingredients
- 1 cup chickpea flour
- 1 1/4 cups water
- 3 tbsp olive oil, plus more for the pan
- 1 tsp salt
- Black pepper
Steps
- Whisk the chickpea flour, water, olive oil, and salt into a thin batter.
- Rest the batter for at least 1-2 hours.
- Heat a well-oiled cast-iron pan very hot under a broiler or in a 500°F+ oven.
- Pour in a thin layer of batter and cook until set, blistered, and crisp at the edges.
- Finish under the broiler for char, then tear into rough pieces and season with black pepper.