A couple of handfuls of firm ripe tomatoes, some olive oil, a few cloves of garlic, a a palmful of basil leaves, a loaf of rustic Italian bread, some flakes of sea salt, a few grindings of black pepper
I thought I'd follow on from my previous toast-post with another, inspired by last summer's holiday in Tuscany. This was one of our almost daily treats, handed around to everyone lounging around the pool and washed down with a chilled peroni or gin and tonic. It felt like the height of luxury and the embodiment of all that's good about Italian cuisine - brilliant ingredients combined in a simple way with the minimum of fuss.
I suppose that we're really talking about bruschetta here; I think it's a combination of Nigel Slater's tomato sauce from Appetite and the sorts of starters in one of the River Cafe cookbooks. Incidentally, 'bruschetta' is one of those words that baffles and embarrasses me. I am reliably informed by a friend who is fluent in Italian that this is pronounced 'broos-ketta', but I've tried that in (some probably entirely unauthentic) Italian restaurants in the UK, and been met with the almost uniform response of the waiting person repeating my order but pronouncing it 'brooshetta'. This is obviously an issue that's irritated others as well. This leaves me wondering: should I pronounce it 'correctly' (i.e. in the way it would be pronounced in Italy), or has it already developed into an 'English' word with its own right to be pronounced 'sh' in a sort of Anglo-Italian way?
Either way, when we were in Italy, we called it 'tomato toast', so there were no arguments.
So: peel and slice the garlic as finely as you can. Hopefully, you'll have the summery garlic that's fat with juice like we found - the sort that exudes itself sweetly and stickily over your fingers as you slice. Heat a few lugs of peppery green and oozy olive oil in a pan, perhaps a big saute pan, until it slightly shimmers. Inherited wisdom seems to be that you shouldn't cook with extra virgin olive oil, but I think this recipe is gentle enough on the oil to leave it with some of its flavours. Add the sliced garlic and cook for perhaps a minute until it has slightly softened.
Meanwhile, quickly rinse a couple of handfuls of the juiciest, firmest, ripest tomatoes you can lay your hands on. In Italy, this was easy - big, plump, fragrant tomatoes that smelt like tomatoes grown in the garden, that are a deepish red, and that are tempting to bite into like apples. I remember my Dad eating tomatoes like apples when I was little, and I tried, and it put me off tomatoes for years - I just don't think we have juicy or sweet or crisp enough tomatoes in the UK, or at least not when they've been rolling about in a Star Wars lunchbox.
Chop the tomatoes roughly, add them to the garlic, put the heat on quite low (the tomatoes should quietly bubble without burning the garlic), and leave for something like twenty to forty minutes.
Take thickish (2/3cm) slices of the bread. I think it should be something reasonably dense so it soaks up all the juices, rather than a holey ciabatta. At this point, we toasted them in a lethal old-fashioned toaster; I reckon it would be better if you used a griddle pan that's been heated for five or ten minutes so it's really hot. Griddle both sides of the bread so it's charred in places and golden brown in others. Peel another clove of the garlic (your fingers will smell of garlic even after you've washed them and swum for an hour or so, but it's such good garlic that you'll not mind) and rub one side of the toasts so the garlic wears down to a little endpiece. You might be tempted to eat this - it really is that good. Drizzle over a generous slathering of the pepperiest and ooziest olive oil in the kitchen and crunch some crystals of sea salt over everything.
The tomatoes are done when you think they look done - there are no rules. I like them when they've completely softened and some of the liquid has also evaporated off so they're intensely sweet and thick - a gloopy tomatoey sludge. Rip some basil up and add it to the tomato, and add a decent amount of salt and pepper. If you were using crappy tomatoes, you might be tempted to add a little sugar and maybe some chilli flakes (I'd stick these in with the garlic at the start), but if you've got good tomatoes, I wouldn't bother. Slap a spoonful of tomato onto each toast - it should be glistening slightly from the olive oil, a bit like a nice ragu. You could add a grating or shaving of parmesan or somesuch, but again, if your tomatoes are good, you won't need to.
Walk down the long stoney pathway to the swimming pool carrying your tray of broosketta and with as many bottles of peroni as you can take, interrupt the slightly hungover people sitting around the pool reading, and offer around your crusty sweet tomato toasts to the grateful throng.
Did you really get all the way to paragraph 10 until you mentioned chilli?
Posted by: Mog | February 11, 2005 at 12:01 PM