ffwd – pissaladiere

OK, I’ll admit it. I goofed up this week. First, I thought that we were supposed to make soup. And the simplest Breton fish soup at that! Since I’d already committed to making a different Dorie soup, I thought I’d just substitute. Then I really read what I was supposed to be making – the pissaladiere! I have always wanted to try it, but now, I was a little behind. And by that I mean, it was now 6pm on Thursday… you know where I’m going with this! But, good news! It’s really easy. So maybe I didn’t really serve it as an appetizer (more of a late-evening snack), but it was fun to try.

First you need to make the dough. As you’ve probably guessed by now, I’m kind of lazy – so I decided to use my food processor. That makes it pretty easy to pull together.

And eventually, it turns into a nice, smooth dough. Since this has a lot of olive oil and an egg for the amount of flour, I wasn’t sure what the texture would turn out to be. I had to add a bit more flour because I wasn’t kneading this by hand, but that was ok. It ended up being a nice, soft dough – I assume like what it was supposed to be!

The dough gets covered, and allowed to rise for about an hour. If I were doing this recipe correctly, I’d take that time to make the caramelized onions. But since I’d recently made the spicy onions that I’ve talked about before… I thought I’d use those instead. AND, since I didn’t realize that I was out of anchovy fillets in the pantry – I was going to be resorting to anchovy paste. So, I got to sit back and relax instead!

Now that my dough looked like this – it was time to move forward with the recipe.

I decided that since it was late, I’d only make half of the recipe (and Dorie lets us know that the dough can be made ahead, so I thought I’d save half for the next day). It gets flattened out on a parchment sheet. The recipe says that it’s supposed to be thin, though the finished photo looks like there is a bit of a rim around the sides, so that’s what I went for.

The onions are added, the pissaladiere is baked for about twenty minutes, and then the other toppings are added, and it’s baked for it’s final 5 minutes just to heat them up.

Once out of the oven, it kind of screamed for a glass of red wine to go with. I don’t know if it’s traditional or not, but… it seemed to work.

Since I already had some spiciness from the chipotles in the caramelized onions that I used, I decided that I’d have both kalamata olives, and some Spanish green olives on top, to take it on a bit of a southwestern detour. The anchovies mixed into the onions added another interesting flavor element.

I agree with Dorie that the thinnest part of the crust was the best, so while it looked pretty, next time I will make sure that there isn’t much of an edge of thicker dough. It was crisp and tender all at the same time. And it was so easy and fast.

What will I do with the rest of the dough? I’ve really been wanting some creamy gorgonzola or brie with some fig jam and caramelized onions too – so that might just get the nod.

Happily, I re-looked at the site to see what I was actually supposed to make, so I didn’t miss out on another fun recipe!