Pissaladière
I’m reading Joanne Harris' Vianne at the moment. On p20 or so, a young Vianne Rocher savours a slice of pissaladière in nineties Marseilles, reminding me that it exists and is delicious.
Specifically, it is a delicious anchovy and onion topped bread originating in Provence. Imagine a puttanesca pizza reverse engineered by a man with an onion fetish.
I've never eaten it in France or made it at home, and one of those is a good deal simpler to fix, so here we are.
You could eyeball the proximity of Provence and Italy and draw lines between pissaladière and pizza, and you might well be right - I've not done the homework. But this topped bread (or tart; there's a whole thing) with onions and anchovies feels more like culinary carcinisation. It's just not that hard to get from bread dough to putting tasty things on top of it, and off we go, ragged claws, scuttle scuttle.
What?
I did do just enough homework to suspect that the tempting pizza/pissaladière homophony smells like false cognate. “Pissalat” is a Provencal salted fish paste condiment, and the etymology of "pizza" is a food historian knife fight waiting to happen.
It's possible it shouldn't even be bread. The internet seems divided on whether pissaladière ought to be made with pastry, seeming as it does to be dithering between schiacciata and flammkuchen. The Eli(s|z)abeths Luard and David say bread dough, but David gives a pastry recipe. Julia Child says pastry. Larousse makes a slapdash allusion to a filled tart, and Delia and Prue both opt for bread. In the end I settled this by recourse to a foundational gastronomic principle: Making puff pastry is a pain in the arse.
Will that do as an excuse for playing fast and loose with the recipes? Hopefully. Because what I've actually done here is fuck about with my Detroit pizza dough, and add even more onions. It's probably a bit fluffier than is traditional, but I rather like it that way.
Ingredients:
Dough:
Strong white bread flour, 250g
Water, 175g
Salt 7g
Yeast, 5g
Olive oil, 1tbsp
Onion, half a small one (about 50g)
Topping
Onions, 1kg (ish)
Garlic, 2-3 cloves
Anchovies, 2x 50g tins will be a little more than you need
Black olives, handful
Thyme, pinch
Butter for frying, plenty
Serves 6 comfortably.
Notes:
Tin - This uses the 30x25x5cm roasting pan pictured above, and rises a little over half way up it. Anything of a roughly similar base area will be fine, but see the note below on scaling. Traditional recipes don't use a high-sided tin at all, and roll the pissaladière out like a pizza. That's preferable to a shallow tin it'll flop over the edges of, but more faff overall, and I like the higher rise.
Scaling - Bread - broadly, generally - does ratios! This is designed as a 250g flour 70% hydration dough, to be spread across a 750cm² tin (30x25). A more conventional 40x20 tin would only need a 1.07 multiplier and I probably wouldn't bother. But for the 30x40cm bastard I use for Detroit-style pizza you bet I'm using 400g of flour and 280g of water.
Gear - a stand mixer will really help. So will a mandoline. You don't need either, but yikes you're gonna be spending some time.
Time - speaking of which: you’re not getting this done in under four hours. I mean, maybe, if you’re doing it in a really warm kitchen and the rising is punchy? Two one hour rises and a twenty minute bake? It’s possible. But let’s take it easy. Do an overnight fridge prove if you want this for a weeknight or brunch.
Instructions:
I'm going to assume a stand mixer here. If you're making the dough by hand, use a big bowl and a lot of elbow grease.
Mix together the flour, salt, and yeast. Add the water, and mix everything together until it's just formed a dough. Let it rest for 10 minutes. This lets a bunch of enzyme shit kick off and makes the whole gluten malarkey easier later. That's also why we haven't added the oil yet.
After ten minutes, add the oil. Mix it in a bit, and knead for another 10 mins on medium until silky and elastic. You can windowpane test if that's your bag, but it's too sticky for that to be a really fun time.
Leave the dough to rise, covered, for at least an hour (probably two at room temperature), or - in accordance with the prophecy - "until doubled in bulk".
While that's happening: onions. Peel them, halve them, reserve one half. Peel and chop the garlic.
Using a mandoline or a sharp knife and some patience, slice the onions fine-ish. I use the widest gauge on my mandoline for this.
Melt a good dollop of butter in some oil in a sturdy pan at a medium heat, and add the onions. Cover, and let them cook down for about 30 mins, stirring periodically. Remove the lid, add the garlic, a couple of anchovy fillets, and a pinch of thyme. Then reduce the heat a little, and continue to cook stirring periodically got another 15-20 mins, until soft and beginning to caramelise. Take care to manage the heat and the stirring so they don't really brown. A bit golden is delicious and inevitable, but don't let them get too dark. By the end they should be virtually a paste.
Leave to cool.
Oil your baking dish well, and attend to the risen dough.
On the finest setting of the mandoline or using a very sharp knife and quite a lot of patience, finely slice the reserved onion half, and mix this in to the dough as thoroughly as you can.
Dollop the resulting oniony mess into the baking dish, and stretch it out to cover the base as well as you can without it tearing. Don't worry if it doesn't go all the way - we're going to rest it and go again once it's relaxed. Cover the dish, and leave it for 20-30 mins. Stretch the dough the rest of the way, and let it rest and rise, covered for at least another 30 mins.
It's possible you'll need to repeat the stretch-and-rest to cover the pan, but probably not. If you do, just make sure it gets a few minutes final rest and rise.
Heat the oven to 220°C
Spread the onions over the top of the dough, and then arrange anchovies and olives on top. A harlequin criss-cross with a olive dotted into each diamond is conventional, but I'm not your mum.
Put the pissaladière in the oven and bake for about 25 mins.
Let it cool a bit, pop it out of the tin, and serve.
I haven't the foggiest what with. A salad for lunch perhaps. It's good warm or cold.
It’s a little hard to describe if I’m honest. The onion paste and fluffy dough make it softer and gooier than a pizza, and the caramelised onion smacks into the salt of the anchovy for an explosion of contrast. Does it need the extra onion I’ve worked through the dough? Perhaps no more than it needs the extra fluffiness of the tin bake and the longer rise, but I enjoy it.
Elizabeth David in French Provincial Cooking, 1960.
I’ve seen recipes add tomatoes, or a lick of tomato paste to the onions. I’ve seen the extra anchovy in the onion mix omitted. Elizabeth David makes it with an enriched yeasted pastry dough.
It would make a great starter or plate of buffet bites. In Vianne it’s a bistro lunch in a Marseilles back-street, with a salad of leaves and tomatoes, which sounds delightful.