Flammenkuchen

Traditionally "Flammenkuchen" was made from leftover bread dough when baking bread while heating up wood fired bread ovens. This leftover dough was covered in common ingredients to make it more tasty. Over time this was being made thinner and thinner and became a standalone dish.

While you can do basically any topping the base "sauce" is most often a type of Sour Cream that is widely used in central and eastern Europe called "Schmand" (engl.: Smetana), this makes for a great balanced sauce that can go with most types of toppings. The "Schmand" is sometimes mixed with "Quark" but recipes differ from family to family and village to village.

Onto the dough: While you can do a yeast based one, the modern "Flammenkuchen" is not supposed to be a thick pie. In fact it is supposed to be a lot thinner than Italian pizza. But again, do it the way you prefer it, as recipes from the region widely differ too.

I personally recommend a recipe without yeast but I will mention some yeast/sourdough ones that taste great too.

Toppings:
As mentioned above you can throw basically anything onto it, of which you think it would fit into the slightly sour environment of the base souce. I will mention one classic one sweet and one vegetarian one.

Description	Ingredients	Instructions
Yeast-less Dough	2 tablespoons oil; 125 ml of water; 1 pinch of salt; 250 g flour	Knead it together and roll it out as thinly as possible. Form round round pieces, bake on Pizza Stone if possible.
Yeast Dough	200 g of flour; 1/4 cube of fresh yeast; 1/4 tsp of sugar;1 pinch of salt;125 ml of milk	Just mix it like your bog standard yeast dough but do not overproof it! ONLY 20 MIN PROOFING!
Sourdough Recipe	450 g flour; 1 pinch of sugar; 1 pinch of salt; 220 ml of water; 80g sourdough	Knead together 1h proofing time
"Schmand" replacement	(yoghurt, cream >20% fat) / creme fraiche	Either ferment(for 2 days) the cream using a tiny bit of yoghurt (like 1 spoon per 100 gram) as starter or use creme fraiche(inferior).
Classic topping	smoked ham(not cooked something like this); 2 onions;chives	Chop onions into halves then into thin slices. cube the ham finely or cut it into strips. bake it with the topping and garnish with chives.
Vegetarian version	Potato; leek	chop the potato(es) into fine cubes, cut the leek into thin slices. Top the "Flammenkuchen" with it and bake it.
Sweet toppings	Apple(pick some sweet red ones not the sour green ones); flaked almonds; cinnamon; sugar.	Chop apples into thin slices. Top your base(Dough + "Schmand") with your apples and almonds, mix sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle it on top.

Recipes concerning the toppings differ from family to family and can be varied as much as you want. Feel free to experiment with whatever you see fit! Some tasty Ideas are salmon; or maybe a greek version with olives, feta and bell-peppers.

There is basically no wrong way to make Flammenkuchen. The concept is only a thin crust with a white sourcream-based sauce on top.

More traditional German recipes will follow as soon as I have time to write it up.

submitted by /u/Fjiordor
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