The Slavic east and the Balkans · Volume 29, Bura, Smoke and the Ottoman Line

Soparnik

Name: Soparnik
Total time: 1 h 30 min
Yield: Serves 6 to 8, scaled down from the traditional size
Cuisine: The Adriatic and Albania
Ingredients: 500 g plain flour, plus water and a little olive oil, for the dough, split into two sheets; 1 kg chard (blitva), shredded; 1 red onion, thinly sliced; generously olive oil, and crushed garlic, to finish; a little salt

Coastal Croatia

Soparnik, a thin unleavened chard and onion pie: a large, flat, rustic pie with a pale golden, blistered and lightly charred crust in patches, cut into rough rectangles.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 1 hour 30

Researched: 14 sources cited
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Poljica was a self-governing hill district east of Split with real medieval autonomy, and soparnik is registered as an EU Protected Geographical Indication with an oddly specific detail worth keeping: the traditional pie is circular, 90 to 110 cm across.

by Coastal Croatia

Since Croatia's 2013 EU accession, a wave of PDO and PGI registrations has formalised much of what follows in this chapter: Dalmatinski pršut, Istarski pršut (PDO, 2015), Paška janjetina (2015), Paški sir (PDO, 2019), Poljički soparnik (PGI). Two boundaries are worth naming rather than quietly stepping over. This volume's continental neighbour, the grill-and-paprika Balkans of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, continental Croatia, North Macedonia and Kosovo, sits in this atlas's own EU-28, and that is where ćevapi, burek and the fuller Ottoman-Habsburg grill tradition belong; nothing in that repertoire is re-derived here. Slovenia's own Adriatic coast is a genuine sliver, the Primorska strip around Piran, and it touches this volume lightly and honestly: Slovenia as a whole reads as Alpine and Austrian in its potica and štruklji, not Balkan, and belongs in this atlas's Central Europe grouping, but the reader walking the coast road south from Trieste will find Piran's own pršut and olive oil sitting in exactly the same technical family this chapter describes for Istria, one bay further north than this chapter's own remit runs.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 6 to 8, scaled down from the traditional size. About 1.5 hours.

Ingredients

500 g plain flour, plus water and a little olive oil, for the dough, split into two sheets
1 kg chard (blitva), shredded
1 red onion, thinly sliced
generously olive oil, and crushed garlic, to finish
a little salt

Method

Make a plain, unleavened dough from flour, water and a little oil, rest it, then divide and roll into two very thin sheets, roughly 35 to 40 cm across.
Mix the raw shredded chard with the sliced onion, a little salt and a drizzle of oil; this filling is not pre-cooked.
Spread the filling over one sheet, cover with the second, and seal the edges.
Bake on a very hot pizza stone or baking steel, or directly on a hot Big Green Egg deflector, until the top is bubbled and lightly charred in patches, roughly 15 to 20 minutes at as high a heat as the oven or Egg will hold.
Brush generously with olive oil and crushed garlic as soon as it comes off the heat, and cut into squares to serve.

What a modern chef changes

The real hearth-baking logic, reached through kit that does the same physical job.

Rung 4

Method

Bake directly on the deflector plate of a Big Green Egg run hot, rather than in a domestic oven, the closest genuine equivalent in a UK kitchen to baking under embers on an open hearth, giving real char rather than an oven's even, gentler colour.
Char the onion separately over open flame before mixing it into the filling, adding a smoke note the raw filling alone does not carry.
Finish with oil and garlic crushed to a paste in a mortar rather than simply chopped, closer to how a home cook would actually have worked it, and more evenly distributed across the hot pastry.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists