Socca, a Great Vegan Appetizer

One of my favorite appetizers or snacks is a vegan street food from southern France called socca. It’s made with garbanzo bean flour, and although it looks like flatbread, there’s no gluten in it. Best of all, no recipe necessary!

Here’s the formula: 1 C. water, 1 C. garbanzo bean flour. That’s about it. The rest is obvious: some fat so it doesn’t stick, some heat so it cooks. Salt for flavor. From there, the sky’s the limit.

Here’s a classic: half an onion softened in olive oil over medium heat in an oven-safe skillet (I use cast iron). Pour in the flour/water mix with a bit of salt and some minced rosemary. Bake at 350 for about twenty minutes or until it’s dry all the way through.

Recently, I experimented with adding a spice mix to the batter. One of Mr. Hollywood’s colleagues gave us a kit for dipping bread that includes a small jar of “Tuscan dipping mix” or something like that. It’s got herbs, dried tomato bits, salt,… plenty fine to mix with olive oil for your crusty bread. But I rarely use it that way. I sprinkle it on popcorn mix it into soups, … Recently, I experimented adding it to the socca batter. I meant to make a pan to share, but I ate the whole thing. Fabulous! So, you might think of socca as an opportunity to use up spice mixes that have inexplicably taken up house in your cupboard.

Later, I made two pans for guests, sautéing onion in olive oil, then adding that “Tuscan mix” batter and baking to cut in small squares for appetizers. Feeling generous (and worried that it wasn’t good enough as-is), I added more onions and more oil to the onions and to the batter, too. The result didn’t hang together quite as well as it should. Not bad, but not quite the easy pick-up-with-your-fingers app I had in mind. Note to self: let the onions be a condiment-like addition, not a layer unto themselves. Plus, next time I’d also flip the squares over so the onions are on top. You probably already thought of that.

It reminds me that I found another recipe for socca, a recipe I haven’t tried yet, that sounds intriguing. Here’s a picture of the picture in the cookbook, Plenty, by Yotam Ottolenghi. It’s got egg whites and vinegar in the batter, cooked in individual servings in a small pan on the stove, and topped like flatbread. More trouble but not by much, and it looks delicious. If you try it, let me know how it goes!