“Onion Pizza”

My favorite restaurant in the whole wide world is Bistrot La Minette, a French restaurant near the intersection of 6th & Bainbridge in Philadelphia.  We’ve been eating there since they first opened in 2008.  They aren’t terribly fancy, but they execute good French food perfectly every time.  I could eat their truite meunière every night for the rest of my life and I’d be happy.  So one night a couple of years after they opened, I tried Flammeküeche as an appetizer.  The menu described it as an Alsatian flatbread with onions, crème frâiche, lardons and fine herbes. It was delicious, but so is everything at Bistrot La Minette, and I didn’t think too much about it.

Until a couple of years ago when my wife and I went to Jamie’s Italian in Glasgow.  I forget what Jamie called it but we ordered what turned out to be carmelized onions, a heavily seasoned sausage and a cream base with a touch of blue cheese on a flatbread.  I immediately thought back to the Flammeküeche but I also was saying to myself, “I can do that.”

Except with the cream base (or crème frâiche) and the pizza dough, these things packed on a million calories.  Plus, I don’t make dough.  So how do I figure this out?  Starting from the ground up, you have the flatbread, carmelized onions, some kind of meat, and a dairy topping.  The meat part is easy – any kind of charcuterie or sausage you like will work.  The onions are pretty straightforward too – ordinary carmelized onions.  They can take a lot of time but the approach is pretty basic.  Take an onion, cook the water of out it and keep cooking until the onions turn medium to dark brown.  I use carmelized onions so much I’ll put up a post on onions one of these days.

Figuring out how to handle the flatbread seemed to be the key to this.  I could buy a frozen or pre-made flatbread but that could get expensive.  I could also make my own dough, but that would take way too much time.  However, tortillas turn out to work just fine.  They don’t take long to cook and they provide a solid bottom.  But if you use a tortilla, a crème frâiche base would create far too much moisture and the tortilla would never crisp up.  Gongonzola, on the other hand, was perfect.

Put it all together and you have an amazing lunch with very little effort (except for cartelizing the onions).  Preheat the oven to 475°.  Place your tortillas on a sheet pan and cover each with a layer of onions.  Scatter the sausage (or the bacon or the sliced meat) over the onions and then scatter some gorgonzola over the meat.  Cook for 6-7 minutes, until the cheese just starts to turn brown.  Delicious.

It’s also a framework for more.  Slow roasted tomatoes can replace the onions.  The cheese can be altered to complement the meat – for example, substituting cheddar if you use bacon or shredded parmesan if you use pepperoni.  However you put it together, you get the strong flavor of the seasoned meat enveloped in the sharpness of the cheese and the sweetness of the onion (or tomato) base and the tortillas provide the means of picking it up and eating.  If you’ve already go the onions (or slow roasted tomatoes) in hand, it takes less than ten minutes. And the calorie count is a lot lower than a regular pizza.

Recipe

Ingredients (multiply ingredients by number of tortillas used)

1 tortilla

1 onion, caramelized

7 1/8″ slices of dried sausage or four slices of sliced charcuterie of your choice

1/4 cup gorgonzola cheese

Directions

Preheat oven to 475°

Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper and set tortillas on the paper

Cover tortilla with a thin layer of onions that covers the surface

Add meat.  If using dried sausage, a ring of six slices with one in the center works well.  If using fresh ham or sausage, slightly overlapping slices covering the tortilla also works well.

Scatter the cheese over the meat, spreading out any clumps.

Place in the oven and check after 6 minutes.  If the cheese is melting and starting to brown, it’s done.  Otherwise, keep going.

Cut in quarters and serve.