Coca de mollitas recipe: Alicante crumb coca

Coca de mollitas looks like a plain flatbread until you break it: the base stays soft and the crumbs on top, toasted and crunchy, melt in the mouth. It is a savoury coca, among the simplest in Alicante cooking, and needs no filling. What defines it is that topping.

What mollitas are and why this coca is savoury

Mollitas are flour, oil and salt rubbed with the fingers until they form small lumps. Nothing more. There is no sugar in the dough or in the crumbs, so the coca isn’t a sweet: it is a kind of savoury flatbread, as the El Español Alacant recipe we follow as our base describes it. The Crevillent guide to cocas, which also records the coca de mollitas, treats it in the same register, with flour, water and salt.

It is worth saying because “coca” sometimes makes people think of sponge cake. If what you are looking for is something sweet, see the llanda sponge cake, which is a tray-baked sponge. And if you want another savoury Alicante coca, but with a filling, the tuna coca is the one for the Hogueras.

A simple dough and crumbs rubbed with the fingers

The dough has wheat flour, water, olive oil, a pinch of salt and a teaspoon of baking powder. It is mixed, kneaded a little and rolled out on the tray over baking paper. The source asks for no resting or proving: from the table to the oven.

The crumbs are what need most care. Rub them with your fingertips, as you would for shortcrust pastry, until you see small, uneven lumps. Scatter them over the whole dough, edges included, so every piece has its crunchy share.

Oven: 180 °C and watching the colour

The source gives 180 °C and 20 to 25 minutes, until the coca is golden and crisp. The oven is what toasts the crumbs, so don’t take the coca out too soon: if you remove it pale, the mollitas stay soft. Every oven runs differently; look at the colour and, if it isn’t golden at 20 minutes, give it a few minutes more.

The Crevillent municipal guide (2024) speaks of a hotter oven, between 200 and 220 °C, for a coca de mollitas built on a puff pastry base. That is another coca, with another base, and we haven’t mixed its data with this recipe’s.

How to eat it: on its own, with cured sausage or with tomato

It is served hot or lukewarm. On its own is how you best enjoy the texture, but El Español’s recipe names three companions: cured sausage, cheese and grated tomato with tuna. It also mentions olives and a good local wine. Some people top it with anchovies, cured sausage or grated tomato, and that is already a variation on the classic recipe, which has only the base and the mollitas.

It is cut into squares and passed around on the tray, so it works well on a table for nibbling.

The 2025 coca de mollitas contest

Coca de mollitas made the newspapers in October 2025. On the 18th of that month, the Avenida de la Constitución in Alicante hosted a contest in which 26 bakeries and baking workshops prepared a coca that the notary measured at 108.2 metres. The local police estimated some 10,000 people. It was an event within the programme of Alicante, Spanish Capital of Gastronomy 2025.

It was an event of 2025. Coca de mollitas, by contrast, is made in the province’s ovens all year round.

For a group

One tray is enough for a few people to nibble on; for a meal with many, several batches are made and spread around the table. If there are lots of you, we cook for groups with set-up and bar: see cooking and bar for fiestas.