Farinata (Baked Chickpea Flour Batter, Crisp Outside and Creamy Within)

Name: Farinata (Baked Chickpea Flour Batter, Crisp Outside and Creamy Within)
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 20 min
Total time: 40 min
Yield: 6 servings
Cuisine: Italian
Ingredients: 300 g chickpea flour; 900 ml water; 2 tsp salt; 60 ml extra virgin olive oil; 60 ml extra virgin olive oil; 1 tsp coarse black pepper; 1 sprig rosemary; 1 onion; 100 g stracchino cheese

A Ligurian street food of chickpea flour, water, olive oil and salt, baked 5mm thin in a very hot oven. No yeast, no egg, no wheat. This site’s flour guide explains bread structure as protein — and chickpea flour has more protein than wheat while forming no gluten at all, because it is storage protein that cannot link up. So the batter can be stirred as hard as you like without toughening, and what sets it is protein coagulating and starch gelatinising, which is why it comes out crisp at the edges and custardy in the middle.

Ingredients

6servings

The batter
chickpea flour · farina di ceci, finely milled300 g
water · three times the flour, lukewarm900 ml
salt2 tsp
extra virgin olive oil · the share that goes into the batter60 ml
For the pan
extra virgin olive oil · the share that goes into the pan; do not be sparing60 ml
To finish
coarse black pepper · in Liguria that is the whole topping1 tsp
rosemary · optional1 sprig
Variations
onion · sliced thin and laid over the top1
stracchino cheese · optional100 g

Steps

Whisk the chickpea flour into 900ml of water through a sieve. Any lumps left will taste of raw flour in the finished farinata.
⏲ 10 min
Cover it and leave it at room temperature for four hours at least, overnight for preference. This is not a gluten rest: coarse pulse flour simply takes that long to take up the water.
A thick white foam rises to the top. Skim it off and throw it away. Those are the chickpea saponins, and left in they taste soapy and bitter. This step is the difference between farinata and a failure.
⏲ 5 min
Stir in the salt and 60ml of olive oil. Beat it as hard as you like — with no gluten to develop, there is nothing to toughen.
⏲ 3 min
Heat the oven to 250C, or as hot as it goes, with a copper or cast-iron pan in it (what your oven is doing).
⏲ 20 min
Take the hot pan out, pour in the other 60ml of oil, and pour the batter in 5mm deep. Oil rising round the edges of the batter is correct — that oil is what fries the rim.
⏲ 3 min
Bake fifteen to twenty minutes, until the surface is golden with dark blisters here and there. The fiercer the top heat the better. The inside should still be soft, not set.
⏲ 20 min
Grind coarse pepper over it and cut it into squares while hot. Cold, it is a different food — the creaminess inside is gone.
⏲ 5 min

Tips & Variations

Variations

Names: farinata in Liguria, cecina on the Tuscan coast, socca in Nice. Nice bakes it thinner and darker.
With onion: sliced onion laid over the batter before baking — the commonest Ligurian version.
With stracchino: a soft cheese melted over it once baked.
Farinata bianca: made with wheat flour instead of chickpea, from around Savona, baked the same way.
Panelle: Sicily sets the same batter firm and fries it in slices. Baked or fried is the whole difference between the two.

Tips

Choosing flour's premise does not hold here. That guide explains wheat by its protein percentage and bounds the claim itself: "within wheat that is the whole mechanism." Chickpea flour has more protein than wheat flour and forms no gluten whatever, because pulse protein is storage protein: it does not link up with water and work.
It fails that premise differently from pumpernickel. Rye does have the gluten proteins, and pentosans physically get between them. Chickpea has no proteins capable of linking in the first place. The same thesis breaks in two different ways.
So beat it as hard as you like. There is no gluten to develop and nothing to toughen — the opposite of the "mix as little as possible" rule that gamja jeon and tempura live by.
The four-hour rest is not a gluten rest. Coarsely milled pulse flour simply takes that long to hydrate. Crêpe rests its batter for a different reason.
Always skim the foam. Chickpea saponins foam in water like soap, and baked in they leave a bitter, soapy aftertaste. When a home farinata does not taste like the one from the shop, this is usually why.
The pan is doing a different job from cornbread's. There the fat is heated until it smokes and the batter fries on the base. Here half the oil is already inside the batter, the pan's oil cooks the thin rim, and the dish is decided by fierce heat from above — the inside has to stay creamy, so cooking only the base is a failure.
Thin, hot, short. Over 5mm the middle is wet pulse porridge; in a lukewarm oven it just dries out.
Eat it at once. Cold, the creaminess is gone and it is only a dry pancake.