The day I celebrated my 33rd birthday was also the day that my younger born child bestowed this world with all her drama and glory. This was no special coincidence, there was no great honour for either of us to be blessed with sharing eachothers’ birthdays. Nope, it was a convenience for both my gynaecologist (who was planning a C-section) and myself who didn’t fancy being stuck in hospital on the weekend. As a result, Monday 25 October, 2010, we dropped Alex off at day care that morning, went down to Greenfields Café for a birthday breakfast, afterwhich I would not be allowed to eat again (for anasthesia purposes). However, regardless of the ‘null by mouth’ hospital bed instructions, and the concept that breastfeeding moms shouldn’t be consuming sugar and chocolate, I did arrive at the hospital complete with hospital bag, nappies and a chocolate cake (topped with the always necessary strawberries) for the nurses, whom I was determined would be celebrating my birthday with me.
They let us home 4 days later, me needing cabbage leaves to reduce the discomfit of my milk bottles, Beth looking a little too tanned for the doctors liking due to bilirubins disease, but we were home nonetheless.
The visitors started arriving on the weekend, and it was a lovely mix of baby-welcomers and belated birthday visitors, my sister arriving with her beagle puppy Lulu, a chicken pie for lunch, and my birthday present- a pizza stone.
While nothing beats a real Italian pizza, I’ve been making pizza at home for several years. I used to own a Woolworths pizza tray, it was a non-stick circular tray with holes in the bottom to cook the bottom of our pizzawith a little extra vooma.
However, my clever sister had recently found an Italian pizza stone on the online website Yuppie Chef (all sorts of culinary bits and bobs imported in to SA). It’s a 33cm diameter ceramic stone that (I guess) mimics the base of a pizza oven. Naturally, my stone comes with certain quirks, or rules I guess. First off, you can’t put the stone in a hot oven- I place it into a cold oven, and then start heating the oven, so the stone heats up at the same time. Second ‘thing’ is that the stone doesn’t like to be wet, so it requires no washing, which is almost better than the pizzas we get off of it!
Over the years since Beth and the pizza stone have been in our lives, we’ve had some happy times building our own pizzas; the girls love making pizza dough, kneading it, rolling it out, choosing their own toppings, and honestly, it’s such beneficial activity for them to do (just as long as you don’t get pissy about messy kitchen spaces like I tend to). Manipulating a lump of pizza dough can be incredibly therapeutic whether you need to be still and at peace or to express your frustrations and, it will swing both ways. Secondly, the opportunity for children to express their own creativity and choose their meal can do wonders for their eating habits.
Perhaps.
But perhaps not, kids are puzzles and will be forever.
So we’ve been occasionally making our own pizzas for 10 years. However, it wasn’t until last week when a friend asked me if I had ever made Flammenkeuche or Tarte Flambée here at home that I realised I haven’t done so. Well, not since I had a better grasp of French anyway.
Tarte Flambée is a regional speciality. As with a lot of European cuisine, the Tarte Flambée is no stranger to its’ own Story of Origon. (Like bouillibaisse, or paella). (Anton heard this this story from a colleague, so forgive me if I don’t have it perfectly correct.)
It turns out that back in the days when bread was made at home, and there was the little bit of dough left at the day end, along with the leftover cream and pieces of lard (bacon bits for the uninitated) that would have the fed the family during the day. The leftover bread dough would have been rolled out flat, spread over with the cream and sprinkled with the strips of streaky bacon and then cooked in the dying embers of the fire that had burned in thier ovens all day. I guess it would have been an entrée at dinner, or simply a meal for tired hardworking farmers who needed to go to bed early .
Tarte flambé is iconic of this region, and is enjoyed by tourists and locals alike. Many restaurants in this city will serve it in some form, whether it’s a chain store pizzeria (not the best in my opinion) or the upmarket tourist restaurants on the Cathedral square that offer them as starters, something to share with the table as you choose your meal. Locals have their favourite places to get their tarte flambée fix, off the tourist trap routes and supermarkets sell pre-rolled bases, and all the garnitures seperately to make your own at home. Some families living in rural areas with gardens have their own little tarte flambée ovens, in as much as South Africans have their built in braai spaces.
Obviously when life is busy with, well, life, taking time to roll out pizza bases and go through the process of taking them in and out of the oven, homemade pizzas is the last meal on the menu for the week.
But I have all of that time right now, so a couple of weekends ago, I tried out homemade Tarte Flambée while Anton and the girls played cards outside the kitchen. I cracked open a bottle of regional Pinot, and while the sun sank, and the locals went about their evening walks, I think I made a pretty successful batch of Tarte Flambée, as I am pretty sure you all may have seen on my Facebook feed. I found a recipe online, but I had to alter it a little, and thought I could share it here.
Tarte Flambée
To make 3 bases:
250g flour
1 teaspoon salt
30ml cooking oil
100ml warm water
•Incorporate the oil and water into the dry ingrediants to form a dough, and knead it until it is smooth and pliable. I have the luxury of a Kenwood mixer, and I use the dough hook to make the dough, processing it for 2-3 minutes. If you knead it by hand, you’ll need to do so for 5 minutes.
Now let it rest for 1 hour while you prepare the toppings. Keep them separate as you would a pizza.
Traditional cream topping:
100g fromage blanc or a good quality cream cheese
100ml double thick cream
Salt, pepper and 1ml ground nutmeg
•Mix these ingrediants together, set aside.
Second toppings:
2 large white onions, sliced up
120g bacon bits (streaky bacon is nicer)
20g butter
• Fry the onions in the butter at a low heat until the onions are translucent in colour but not browned. Set aside.
•Cook the bacon bits and set aside.
Optional Extras:
Very thinly sliced mushrooms
Grated emmenthal cheese (or gruyere)
Other cheese options: Goats cheese and Munster work quite well.
Preheat your oven to 250° C
• Once your dough has rested for an hour, break it into 3 equal pieces, and begin by rolling out the first piece. It needs to be rolled quite thin, so roll it out until its about 3mm thick.
• Now place the base onto an oven proof tray.
• Spread a liberal spoon of the cream topping over the base, follow that with onions and bacon.
• Place into a hot oven and cook for about 10 minutes, at least until the edges are brown.
• Once your first base is in the oven continue with the second.
Tips:
The trick is to not overcrowd these pizzas, so a light sprinkling of the toppings is more favourable.
Its perfectly acceptable to add grated emmenthal, but the cheese is not what makes a tarte flambée so.
It’s not necessary to cook the mushrooms, just make sure you have cut them thin, and naturally, any type of cheese works well, although the Alsaciens and Baden-Wurtemburgens will promote regional cheeses above anything from other parts of the world 😉 Munster cheese is a popular choice in this regard.
When we go down to Au Brasseur in town for Happy Hour Tarte Flambée on a Sunday (2 tartes for 7€), I choose the regional option, which includes sauerkraut. I can guarantee you that my mother is sitting up there in her garden of wild lillies laughing with such delight that this 42 year old daughter of hers enjoys cabbage after 12 years of boarding school misery.
Enjoy these regional specialities with a tradional regional wine, anything of the riesling, gewurtztraminer or pinot blanc varietals.
In the event you want to try this out, here’s a Word Doc that you can print out and save in your favourite recipe file.
Anyway, thats me for the day. I’m off to start in on dinner- chicken brochettes with potato wedges, grilled vegetable salad and I need to cook some asparagus.
I hope that you are keeping well. We may be starting with a gradual deconfinement next week, with grade 5 and the pre-primary kids returning to school next Thursday. We wait to see how it will roll out.
Love and best wishes,
Me.
xx
Pinot, Bretzels, and Cathedrals 