Focaccia di Recco IGP

Recco is a municipality of just over nine square kilometres overlooking the Gulf of Tigullio, wedged between the Portofino promontory and the first foothills of the Ligurian Apennines. It is in this narrow space, where the mountains descend almost to touch the sea, that one of the most recognisable baked preparations in Italian cuisine took shape: Focaccia di Recco col Formaggio, protected under the IGP mark since 2015 by a European standard that confines its production to Recco and the neighbouring municipalities of Avegno, Camogli and Sori.

The structure of the product is almost paradoxical in its simplicity: two sheets of unleavened dough, stretched to a minimal thickness, filled with soft fresh cow's milk cheese, then baked in tinned copper or steel pans at high temperatures, in the order of three hundred degrees. There is no yeast, no oil in the dough, nothing that can mask the quality of the raw materials or compensate for an imprecise hand. The dough must be stretched so thin that it is almost transparent before baking: this is the technical detail that sets the artisanal product apart from its industrial imitation, and that makes the preparation a skill difficult to transfer outside the context in which it was formed.

The transmission of this manual skill still happens today mostly through direct teaching, from baker to baker, within workshops that in many cases have operated for generations. The gesture of stretching the dough — lifting and widening it with open hands, without a rolling pin — takes years of practice and a sensitivity that is hard to put into written instructions. The IGP standard recognises this artisanal dimension as an integral part of the product's identity, not as a folkloric element but as a technical condition necessary to its success.

Local tradition places the origin of the recipe in the period of Saracen raids along the Ligurian coast, when the population would take refuge inland, carrying flour and mountain-pasture cheeses with them. The documented history is less clear, but a similar preparation is recorded in Recco as early as the late nineteenth century, and the first dedicated festival dates back to 1967. What is certain is the connection between the area's geography — scarce in flatland, rich in high-altitude pastures — and the ingredients of a recipe that has never needed additions to establish itself.