This wilderness is paradise enow
January 28th, 2012Friday night. What could be better for a simple dinner on a frosty night, while sitting on the sofa watching a DVD, than Flammkuchen – German pizza?
Flammkuchen – literally, “flame cake” – is a dish from the Alsace-Lorraine region (much of which bounced back and forth between France and Germany over the last couple of centuries).
Flammkuchen is made like a thin-crust pizza, topped with crème fraîche, onions, and Speck - a salt-cured and lightly smoked ham. My first taste of Flammkuchen came about two decades ago while Irina and I were staying in Cousin Axel’s Bauernhof right in the heart of the small German village of Oberotterbach.
Elements of Axel’s “farm” house – like the rear wall, which the house shares with the town Catholic church and cemetery – date from the 13th century. All the while we stayed there those church bells pealed every fifteen minutes, all day and all night long. It’s enough to make one an atheist.
It really was and still is a farm house, dead square in the middle of town. Behind those big doors are a central courtyard; barns, stalls, and sheds; tractors and wagons; a well; a kitchen garden; and a wine and root cellar beneath the living quarters. Farmers live in the village, and sortie out to their fields each day.
Oberotterbach lies just across the border from the French town of Wissembourg, which marks the start of the Deutsche Weinstrasse. Here’s the Deutsches Weintor through which we drove back and forth from Germany to France in our ancient, borrowed Fiat Cinquecento.
The border control station was just on the other side of the “wine gate”. The border controls were pretty much of a joke, as they were easily circumvented. Rather than staying on the main road, instead take one of the numerous back roads that crisscross the border through the vineyards.
We often walked the ~4 km to Wissembourg from Oberotterbach avoiding roads completely, through the vineyards and over the shoulder of the Sonnenberg. During our stay there, EU borders were opened and the inspection stations between Germany and France shuttered.
Back to Flammkuchen. A cramped corner of the vaulted cellar of the oldest house in Oberotterbach – which served for agricultural storage as well as a dwelling – housed (and still houses!) a jazz club called the Musikantebuckl.

Along with the music they served local beer, local wine, and Flammkuchen baked in a wood-fired pizza oven. Love at first bite: I was closer to heaven than a kid from Sacramento could reasonably expect to find himself.
It’s easy to recreate a bit of that heaven here, even though Speck isn’t available. Some recipes call for bacon, but we find bacon too fatty and too smokey. We have found that the uncured side of pork we get when we buy a half a hog – which would be bacon if it were smoked – works just fine once it’s trimmed of all fat.
Flammkuchen à La Ferme Noire
For two 12″ Flammkucken:
1 lb Irina’s bread dough
½ lb well-trimmed pork belly, cut into small cubes
1 medium red onion
6 oz crème fraîche (we use the delicious crema Mexicana that is available locally)
Sea salt
Crushed black pepper
A small piece of a whole nutmeg, crushed.Place the dough on a well-floured surface. Divide into two pieces and roll into balls, coating liberally with flour. Flatten a bit with the palm of your hand, and roll out with a pizza roller, dusting with additional flour as necessary.
This dough is really wet, so it demands a bit of special care for the process to go smoothly. When you’ve finished rolling the skins out, make sure they are well-dusted with flour. Fold into halves, then quarters; place on a board covered with waxed paper (we use a couple of pieces of Masonite cut into 12″ x 12″ squares), unfold, and set aside to rise for an hour or so and to dry on top a bit.
While the dough is resting, rising, and drying, trim any fat off the pork and cut the meat into small cubes. Put the cubes of meat in a bowl, add salt, crushed pepper, and crushed nutmeg, and toss until the meat is evenly coated. Peel the onion and cut into thin strips, separating the layers.
About a half hour before cooking, put your pizza stone into the oven to pre-heat. You’ll want to use a very hot oven (like 500°). We most often cook pizza outdoors on a gas barbeque, especially in the summer when you don’t want to be heating up the kitchen.
While the oven and pizza stone are getting hot, prepare the Flammkuchen. The pizza skins must be transferred to a make-up board. We use larger and thicker pieces of Masonite for this purpose, 16″ x 24″ x ¼”; the ample size of the make-up board allows plenty of room to get the pizza sliding around freely before sliding it onto the hot pizza stone to bake. First sprinkle the make-up board liberally with corn meal (the corn meal acts like little ball bearings on which the pizza can roll around). Then flip the pizza skin on top of the corn meal so it’s waxed-paper side up, and peel off the waxed paper.
Spread the crème fraîche over the pizza skins. Sprinkle evenly with the onions, then with the seasoned meat. Tap the side of the make-up board to make sure the pizza is sliding free, then slide the pizza off the make-up board and onto the hot pizza stone.
Close the cover (or the oven door) and bake until the crust is browned and crispy. And as my dear departed father would say, video camera in hand, here we are.
We had planned to save one of the two Flammkuchen in the freezer for another day, but it tasted so darn good we ate them both!
We have made vegetarian versions of Flammkuchen too, substituting local wild mushrooms (from The Mushroomery) for the pork. While not traditional, it’s really delicious, too.































