Bavarian Rahmfleck (Rahmfleckerl, Bread-Dough Flatbread with Schmand and Bacon)

The dough. Flammkuchen is baked from a yeast-free dough rolled paper-thin and turns crisp and brittle. The Rahmfleck, by contrast, uses a risen bread dough with a share of rye, is about half a centimetre thick and stays soft and bread-like inside. The topping is more strongly seasoned too: garlic, caraway and paprika do not appear on the Alsatian Flammkuchen.

Both are usual. The original Neuburg version specified chives, the Mindelheim recipe explicitly allows either, and at Christmas markets you now mostly see the more robust spring onion rings — as in the photo for this recipe. If you use chives, cut them finer and be more generous.

Yes. Replace the diced ham with onion rings fried in butter and toasted sunflower seeds, or with thinly shaved, pre-cooked potato slices. What matters is that the topping stays salty and savoury enough, because Schmand on its own would be too mild.

Younger than its setting suggests. Because you almost only get it from the wood-fired oven at medieval and historical festivals, many take it for old peasant fare. In fact baker Wolfgang Schlegl developed it in 1985 for the Neuburg castle festival, after oven builder Hubert Ziegler had set up a mobile stone oven there. After several topping trials, sour cream and bacon stayed, with chives added only after baking.

Mostly at festivals. Its place of origin is the Neuburg castle festival; in Mindelheim it belongs to the food of the historical festivals — every three years at the Frundsbergfest with the Fähnlein Helfenstein, plus annually at the Helfensteiner Tag and the Spectaculum. Medieval markets and Christmas markets across Bavaria have taken it up too. In Neuburg it is by now available outside the castle festival as well.

No, but heat. At the festivals it goes into the stone oven; at home the kitchen oven at its highest setting will do — 250 degrees, top and bottom heat, with a well pre-heated pizza stone or an upturned baking tray underneath. The flatbread should be done in a few minutes: baked too long at too little heat, the sour cream dries out and the bread dough turns hard instead of soft.