Farinata

Farinata is a savoury flatbread made from chickpea flour, water, olive oil and salt, poured into a wide copper pan and baked at 300°C or more until the surface blisters brown and the inside stays soft and custardy. It is three to five millimetres thick (thinner than a crêpe is thick, thicker than a crisp) and it contains no wheat, no yeast, no egg and no dairy.

In Genoese dialect it is fainâ, and in Genoa it is bought by the slice from sciamadde, the old wood-fired shops of the medieval centre, and eaten standing up with a grind of black pepper. It is not a delicacy there; it is lunch.

Because it is naturally gluten-free and vegan, farinata has quietly become one of the Italian dishes with the most traction abroad. Nobody in Liguria planned it that way.

Nutty, earthy and savoury, with the unmistakable roundness of cooked chickpea and a real presence of olive oil. The texture is the point: a thin crisp bottom, a soft almost custardy middle, and a blistered top where the batter has caught and gone bitter-brown in the heat.

There is a faint, deliberate bitterness that comes with chickpea flour: pleasant when it is a whisper, unpleasant when it is not, which is a matter of technique rather than recipe. Black pepper is the traditional and only seasoning, and it works because the heat cuts straight through the oil.

If you have eaten socca in Nice or panisse in Marseille, you already know the flavour. If you have eaten besan chilla in India, you know the flour but not the format.

Eat it hot, within minutes of the oven, with black pepper and nothing else. That is the whole instruction in Genoa, and the reason farinata rarely travels well: it loses its crisp edge inside an hour.

If you are making it, the ratio is one part chickpea flour to three parts water by weight, whisked smooth and left to rest four to ten hours. Skim off the pale foam that rises during the rest: it carries the saponins from the chickpeas and is the single biggest cause of a bitter farinata. Add salt and part of the oil, pour a thin layer into a hot, generously oiled wide pan, and bake at the highest temperature your oven reaches, ideally with the heat from below.

The classic Ligurian variations are few: sliced onion, rosemary, thin artichoke, whitebait, and, on the western Riviera, a spoonful of stracchino added near the end. Genoese purists tolerate onion and rosemary and nothing beyond.

A slice of farinata inside a split piece of focaccia is a real Genoese habit, not a joke.

Farinata is mostly water when it comes out of the oven and it never stops giving that water up, so the crisp surface has a working life measured in tens of minutes. Left on a rack in a single layer it stays crisp for roughly half an hour to an hour, then steam from the soft interior reaches the crust and softens it; stacked or wrapped while hot, the condensation soaks it in minutes. After a few hours at room temperature the surface turns leathery and the inside sets denser as the chickpea starch firms.

In the fridge, loosely covered, it holds two days and goes firm and rubbery when cold, which is the starch retrograding rather than anything else. A hot dry oven or a dry pan at 200 to 230°C for a few minutes reverses most of that and brings the edges back; a microwave steams it and leaves it limp. Pieces freeze for about a month and reheat straight from frozen in the oven, coming back grainier because the ice crystals break up the set interior.

The right thing is thin, three to eight millimetres, deep gold with dark blistered patches across the top, crisp where it met the pan and almost custardy in the middle. It is cut with a spatula out of a wide round copper pan and sold by the wedge, still warm. The ingredient list is four items long: chickpea flour, water, olive oil, salt. No wheat, no eggs, no raising agent; the lift comes from resting the batter four to ten hours before it goes into a very hot oven.

The close relatives cause most of the confusion. Socca in Nice is the same batter, usually thinner and more charred. Tuscan cecina or torta di ceci is the same idea, often a shade thicker. Panelle in Palermo are chickpea batter too, but set firm and deep fried in slices. Indian besan chilla looks similar and is spiced. Anything sold as farinata that contains wheat flour is a different recipe. In Genoa a wedge runs 2 to 3.50 euro; outside Liguria it rarely appears in shops at all and shows up as a 5 to 8 euro restaurant starter.

Farinata is a made-to-order food, not a packaged one, so buying it means finding somewhere that bakes it. Outside Italy, look for Ligurian-run pizzerias and Italian bakeries; in New York, San Francisco, London and Melbourne several serve it by the slice, usually under 'farinata' or 'cecina' on the menu.

What you can buy anywhere is the flour. Chickpea flour, gram flour and besan are the same product: Bob's Red Mill and Anthony's in the US, Natco and East End in the UK, roughly 4 to 8 dollars per pound or £3 to £6 per kilo. Italian brands such as Molino Grassi sell farina di ceci milled specifically for farinata.

The piece of kit that matters is the pan. A tinned copper testo, 40 to 60 cm across, is what Ligurian bakers use and what Italian kitchenware sites ship; expect €60 to €150. A heavy carbon-steel pizza pan preheated until it smokes is the realistic home substitute. Frozen supermarket farinata exists and is not worth the freezer space.

Genoa, obviously and specifically. The sciamadde of the old town (the wood-fired shops around via Ravecca, vico dei Biscotti and piazza Sarzano) have been selling farinata by the slice for well over a century, alongside fried anchovies and vegetable tortes. They are narrow, marble-countered, cash-friendly and open at lunchtime.

Along the coast: Recco, Camogli and Rapallo to the east; Savona, Albenga and Sanremo to the west, where the Ligurian farinata meets the Niçois socca and the argument about which came first is still live.

Over the Tuscan border, Livorno and Pisa serve cecina inside a wheat flatbread as cinque e cinque, a sandwich of two starches that makes complete sense once you have eaten one. And in Sassari, Sardinia, the fainé brought by Genoese settlers is still served in the old-town restaurants, with sausage or onion on top.