This is not focaccia as you know it. The soft, dimpled, olive oil-soaked bread of Genoa shares nothing with this except geography. Focaccia di Recco is two sheets of unleavened dough stretched so thin you can read a newspaper through them, filled with stracchino cheese, and baked in a roaring oven until the surface blisters and chars in spots while the cheese becomes a molten river inside.

The dough contains no yeast. It requires no rising time. What it demands instead is the patience to stretch it properly and the courage to pull it thin enough that you believe it will tear. It will not tear, if your technique is correct. The gluten, developed through kneading and resting, will stretch like silk.

I have watched tourists in Recco order this and then wait to finish their wine before eating. This is a tragedy. The focaccia must be eaten within five minutes of leaving the oven, cut into irregular pieces with scissors, passed hand to hand while still too hot to hold comfortably. The cheese will be flowing, the dough will shatter, and you will understand why this small town guards its recipe with the ferocity of a Ligurian grandmother protecting her pesto.