Coca amb tonyina: Alicante tuna coca recipe

The coca amb tonyina looks like an Alicante empanada (a large savoury pie), but it is not made like one: the dough has no yeast and no resting time: it is scalded. The boiling liquids are poured over the flour, you beat it, and it becomes a dough that rolls out thin. The hard part is not the dough. The hard part is not overdoing the filling and letting it cook through.

A dough made on the hob, not by hand

There is no yeast and no resting here. The oil, water and dry aniseed spirit go on the heat, and when they boil they are poured over the flour. You beat it and bring it together. This is Alicante Turismo’s recipe and, with a few differences, the one other Alicante cooks share, such as Mayte en la Cocina’s.

A warning we think is important: the Alicante Turismo sheet prints the liquids in “cl” (125 cl of water, 250 cl of oil, 65 cl of aniseed spirit) for half a kilo of flour. That would be 2.5 litres of oil, and no dough could take it. El Periòdic, which reproduced the recipe, copies it the same way. We read it as millilitres (125, 250 and 65 ml), which fits other recipes from the area: Mayte en la Cocina makes the same scalded dough with 150 ml of water, 250 ml of oil and 50 ml of dry aniseed spirit for 500 g of flour. It is declared on this page as a units error, so that you do not take the printed figure.

The filling: tuna belly, onion and pine nuts

Alicante Turismo names the filling (tuna belly, fried onion, pine nuts and an optional sweet paprika) but gives no quantities. The ones you see on this page, 250 g of tuna belly, half an onion and 30 g of pine nuts, come from El Periòdic, which published the same recipe in June 2023 attributing it to the Alicante Tourism Department. They are a guide, not a dogma.

And when it comes to the filling, every household does it differently. Bonviveur uses one medium onion for 250 g of tuna; Mayte en la Cocina, a kilo and a half of onion for the same amount of tuna. The more onion, the sweeter and juicier the filling; with little, the tuna dominates. Choose according to how you want your coca: more tuna or more onion.

There is another difference with the tuna that is worth knowing. The base source speaks of belly; other recipes use tonyina de sorra, which is salted, and they do not agree on whether it has to be soaked. If you buy it that way, ask at the shop.

Thin base, thicker lid, and the oven

The base goes thinner than the lid, and that is not a whim: it is how the filling cooks through without the dough underneath staying raw. The lid gets beaten egg on top to brown it, and it bakes for about 40 minutes at 200 °C, according to Alicante Turismo. Mayte en la Cocina bakes at 180 °C and Bonviveur at 190 °C; watch the colour of the lid more than the clock.

The classic mistake is making the base as thick as the lid: the filling never quite cooks through and the coca turns out heavy.

When and with what you eat it

The coca is a Hogueras dish. The night of 20 June, in the middle of the plantà (when the fiesta’s monuments are set up), is when tradition has it eaten, and it goes with brevas. What the fiesta is about is told on the calendar page for the Hogueras of Alicante; what the monument that is set up is, in the glossary entry on the foguera or hoguera; and where it is eaten, in the one on the Hogueras barraca. If you like fiesta baking, in the recipe collection you have the mona de Pascua and the pumpkin fritters. If you want another savoury Alicante coca, the coca de mollitas is topped with crunchy crumbs of flour, oil and salt.

For a crowd

A big coca will do for several people to share; for a whole fiesta committee you have to repeat the batch and scale up the filling carefully. If there are lots of you, we cook for groups with set-up and bar: for your committee, see kitchen and bar for fiestas.