When the recent cream cheese shortage sent me scrambling for alternatives, I discovered a dreamy spreadable goat cheese from Norway. Maybe you’re already a fan of Snøfrisk. Or maybe, like me, you’ve noticed its wedge-shaped package next to other fresh cheeses but never bothered to give it a try. I’m making up for lost time now. I love this stuff. It’s perfect for tarte flambée, the paper-thin Alsatian pizza, which is getting to be a New Year’s Eve tradition at my house.
Snøfrisk debuted in 1994 in time for the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. The producer is Tine, Norway’s largest dairy coop, so artisanal cheese this is not. It’s made with cultured goat’s milk, cow’s cream and salt and it’s packed in its plastic tub when just two or three days old. The color is snow white and the texture like whipped cream cheese—more a spread than a cheese. There’s no goaty aroma whatsoever. It just smells fresh.
Slather it on toasted Danish rye bread and top with smoked fish, sliced beets, cucumbers or radishes. Or fold in some chopped scallions and fresh dill and make your own bagel schmear.
Tarte flambée brings back warm memories of a long-ago vacation in Alsace, where it’s also known as flammekueche. My husband and I have a longstanding disagreement about whether the dish is better made with a yeast dough or a cracker dough (both are traditional), so I’m offering you both methods. The yeast version produces something more like a pizza; the cracker dough is faster to make. If you’d like to weigh in on our argument, please do, in the Comments section below.
Tarte Flambée
Here’s the version with the cracker-like crust. The hotter you can get your oven, the better. For best results, you’ll need a pizza stone or cast-iron pizza pan. The dough recipe is adapted from the Chocolate & Zucchini blog. Serve small portions as an appetizer, or generous portions with a salad as a main course.
Dough:
2 cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
3 tablespoons canola oil
Scant ½ cup ice water
Topping:
2 packages (125 g each) plain Snøfrisk goat cheese
1 tablespoon milk, approximately
Freshly grated nutmeg
4 thick slices of bacon, in ½-inch pieces
1 small red onion, halved and thinly sliced
Cornmeal or polenta for dusting
Chopped Italian parsley
Put a pizza stone or cast-iron pizza pan on a rack in the bottom third of the oven and preheat to your oven’s highest setting for 1 hour.
Make the dough: Put the flour and salt in a bowl and whisk to blend. Add the canola oil, stirring with a fork to distribute the oil evenly. Add the water a little at a time, stirring with the fork until the dough just holds together. You may not need all the water. Knead gently just until you can gather the dough in a ball, then divide in half and shape each half into a burger-like disk. Wrap in plastic film and refrigerate while you make the topping.
Put the cheese in a bowl and stir in just enough milk to loosen it and make it easy to spread; 1 tablespoon should be about right. Add several scrapings of nutmeg.
Put the bacon in a large skillet and set over medium-low heat. Cook until the bacon has rendered 2 tablespoons of fat (it should not be crisp), then transfer the bacon with a slotted spoon to a plate. Add the onions to the skillet and season with salt. Cook just until they soften slightly, 3 to 5 minutes. Transfer the onions to a plate.
Cut two sheets of parchment paper at least 14 inches square. Place one sheet on a work surface and dust lightly with flour. Working with 1 disk of dough at a time, unwrap the dough and set it on the floured parchment. Lightly dust the top of the dough with flour and lay the second parchment sheet on top. With a rolling pin, flatten the dough into a 13-inch circle of even thickness. To keep the dough from sticking to the parchment, frequently flip the dough with its parchment covers, lifting the sheets and flouring the dough lightly each time. Use as little flour as possible to prevent sticking.
When the dough is 13 inches round, remove the top sheet of parchment. Dust a pizza peel with cornmeal. Loosely wrap the dough around your rolling pan, lifting it off of the bottom sheet of parchment as you go, then unfurl the dough onto the pizza peel. Top with half of the cheese, spreading it evenly but leaving a ½ inch rim. Top the cheese with half of the onions and half of the bacon, scattering them evenly.
If your oven has a convection fan, turn it on. Slide the pizza onto the stone and bake until it is well browned on the edges and the onions are starting to crisp, 4 to 4-1/2 minutes. Transfer the pizza to a cutting board, top with the parsley, and cut into desired portions.
With a dish towel, brush any debris off of the stone and return it to the oven to reheat for at least 20 minutes. Repeat the rolling, topping and baking process with the second disk of dough, using 2 fresh sheets of parchment.
Makes two 13-inch pizzas