Nice's flatbread, older than any pizza on the menu board that carries tomato, since tomatoes only reached Europe in the sixteenth century and this is essentially a bread with onions on it. The name comes from pissalat, a salted anchovy paste that was the original topping and is now usually reduced to whole fillets laid in a lattice. The onions are not sauteed, they are cooked down for an hour until they are sweet and collapsed and hold no water at all.
The build
- Cook a kilo of sliced onions in olive oil with thyme and a bay leaf, covered, on a very low heat for an hour. They must never brown fast or fry.
- Uncover, cook off any remaining liquid, and season. They should be pale gold and jammy.
- Spread them thick over the dough, right to the edges.
- Lay anchovy fillets in a diamond lattice and put a black Nicoise olive in each diamond.
The bake
Oven220°C428°F
Time20-25 minutes
Moderate and long. This is a bread bake, not a pizza bake, and a fierce oven burns the onions before the base is done.
On top
- Sauce
- None. The onion is the sauce.
- Cheese
- None, and adding some is the one thing you actually should not do here.
You got it right when You can taste sweet before you taste salt, and there is no liquid anywhere on the tray.