"EXPECT the expected" is usually the best slogan when you're invited for brunch, but what a new friend had waiting on his kitchen counter a few Saturdays ago was not just a fresh idea. It could be the greatest thing since sliced pizza.
My host, a writer and obsessive cook recently back from Barcelona, Spain, had baked his rendition of coca -- a dish he had found everywhere there: a flatbread with caramelized onions, red peppers, summer squash and Spanish sausage. The dough, enriched with seriously good olive oil, had been too sticky to transfer to his pizza stone, though, so he had converted the coca into what he joked was a Catalan calzone with the topping folded inside. It wasn't pretty, but it tasted fabulous.
A little research made a coca seem even more tantalizing, and not just for brunch but for any eating occasion. I learned that the flatbread can be topped with just about anything savory, whether mushrooms or spinach, olives or anchovies, ham, bacon, tomatoes or even a combination of onion and honey. But it is almost as commonly given the sweet treatment, baked with a topping of sugar, pine nuts and anisette, or citrus rind and sugar. The base is nearly always made with a light but rich yeast dough, something like a dense focaccia, but it can take on other forms closer to a pate brisee, with lard adding flakiness. The one hard-and-fast rule is that the quality of the ingredients is key: With such an elemental creation, only the best is good enough.
And after experimenting for a few days, I can say coca might even be better than pizza. The dough for the latter is tricky, and the super-hot baking temperature is tough to get right in a home oven. But a coca is as easy as pie filling: You mix the dough fast, knead it by hand and bake it at roast-chicken setting for perfect results.
Colman Andrews, whose 1988 "Catalan Cuisine" remains the definitive guide to the food of a distinctive region, says a coca is rarely homemade in Spain. Shops there bake them to sell by the piece from 2- to 3-foot-long ovals. "Making bread, making pizza -- people basically don't do that," Andrews says. "They buy that stuff."
But the foundation could not be easier. "It's bread dough that you roll out flat rather than rise into a loaf," Andrews says. He added that toppings are generally very simple; "if you start putting different things on it, I don't know what makes it a coca."
