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| ©John Houser III 2011 |
Summer is in full bloom and the tomatoes are attacking. They are ubiquitous right now from the farmer's markets to family-owned road side stands. Around this time of year I constantly get bombarded with questions about what to do with the 30 quarts of tomatoes that someone has just bought. The first answer is always "just make sauce and jar it" and then I get the look. You know the one. The "no shit dude, of course I'm making sauce. Why else would I have bought 197 pounds of tomatoes?" look. What my tomato laden friends mean to ask is "Look shitbird, if I have to eat one more bowl of pasta, I'm gonna open a vein!! Help!?"
So it is with this in mind that I will give you a culinary life raft. This recipe takes less that ten minutes to make and will become a go-to recipe in your arsenal of summer dishes. As a side or a snack it never ceases to please. It also is a recipe that the sum of its parts are greater than just the few ingredients in it. The higher quality of tomato or olive oil, the better the dish will be as a whole. When people ask me about this recipe they seem to think that its complicated. This couldn't be farther from the truth. This dish is dead simple and really doesn't require much cooking.
It's called Pan Con Tomate and unsurprisingly, when translated, it means bread with tomato. It is my favorite tomato recipe and I make it year round. This time of the year though is especially great for making pan con tomate because the variety of tomatoes to choose from is so wonderfully diverse. I've made this recipe with red tomatoes, green tomatoes, white tomatoes (yes there are!), numerous heirloom varieties and a mixture of all of the above.
I had eaten versions of this recipe before, but it wasn't until I spent two weeks in Spain last year that I really became obsessed with the stuff. In Barcelona, where we spent most of our time, they serve it to you with every meal. Like the basket of bread you get here in America, pan con tomate comes out at the beginning of the meal as a complimentary appetizer, a saucy welcome mat if you will.
Before we start let it be noted that this is a base recipe. Try it this way once and then feel free to improvise. Herbs, fruit and spices all can be added to enhance and change this dish, but this is the mothership recipe. Like I said, just try this once this way first. You might never want to try it another way. It's beauty in simplicity.
So lets get in to it shall we????
Pan Con Tomate
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| ©John Houser III 2011 |
Ingredients:
Red Tomato (your choice of style) Cored* & cut in half
1 Baguette (new or a few days old; both are ok)
Salt- 3/4 tsp
Pepper- I know this is anal but I do 35 turns of my pepper grinder. Tomato loves pepper.
1 clove of garlic- halved. (not pictured, look below for Mr. Garlic)
Extra Virgin Olive Oil (Use the good stuff here. The greener the better)- 1/4 cup
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*Before you start you need to core the tomato. To do this, hold a pairing knife in your palm and stick the point of the knife into the tomato, on an angle, next to the core. Place your thumb into the core as a pivot point and turn the tomato (not the knife) until the core is cut out. |
Now that you now know how to core a tomato, let's move on.
Have a grill heating up or a coal chimney burning down. You'll be using the grill in 10-15 minutes. It will need to be hot. Don't feel like fucking with a grill? No problem. Just put the bread under a broiler, or if adventurous, hold the bread with tongs and toast over your stove's open flame. I have done both and they are equally as effective.
1. Take a tomato half and, over a bowl, grate it on the bigger holes. Grating the tomato serves two purposes. One is that the tomato takes on a great texture, and two you have to stop when you hit the tomato skin. Grating it in fact is also skinning the tomato (its a pain in the ass the other way trust me!).
2. Add salt and pepper to the grated tomato. Mix it all thoroughly. Do this before adding the olive oil.
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| ©John Houser III 2011 |
3. Add the olive oil
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| ©John Houser III 2011 |
4. Cut your baguette in the middle vertically, making two pieces. The cut each half horizontally as if you were making a sandwich. Cut those piece in half vertically. In all you should have 16 pieces of bread ready to be transformed.
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| ©John Houser III 2011 |
4. Drizzle your bread with olive oil. It doesn't have to be the good stuff, but that's what I used.
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| ©John Houser III 2011 |
5. Make sure your grill is hot.
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| ©John Houser III 2011 |
6. Place the bread over the hot coals. Do NOT walk away from the bread. Keep watching the bread to make sure it doesn't become charcoal. Some char on the edges is expected, but you don't want all of the toast blackened.
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| ©John Houser III 2011 |
Remember Mr. Garlic who wasn't pictured above??
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| ©John Houser III 2011 |
7. Wipe one of the halves of garlic on your toast. I find ten strokes to be sufficient. Remember, the garlic should be a background flavor, not a main. We aren't making garlic bread.
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| ©John Houser III 2011 |
8. Spoon your tomato sauce onto the toast. You can put as much or as little as you want. I like a lot on mine. The bread will suck up extra juice if it's piled on a little high.
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| ©John Houser III 2011 |
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| ©John Houser III 2011 |
8. Cut into pieces and serve immediately. It's great crunchy and sorry, the flavor will hook you like a smack addict.
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| ©John Houser III 2011 |
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| ©John Houser III 2011 |
Enjoy!!!!
