Pan de Tomate
June 20, 2007
Summer time brings the best out in BBQ. Whether you’re an omnivore or an herbivore, you’re food will taste radically different if exposed to the heat of an open flame. I had some slightly stale french bread laying around and decided to make it into Pan de Tomate. This dish really has a Catalan name and origin, but I simply referred to it as "tomato bread" with my friend Berta, a Catalan native of Barcelona with whom I visited in San Pol de Mar, Spain.
Berta went to a school for "hoteleria" (hospitality and hotel services study) and would return from the kitchen with stale bread. She and her friend Merced would take both ripe and unripe tomatoes, cut them in half, and intensely rub each piece of bread down with the tomato until it was pulp. They then doused each piece with a very green olive oil, usually rubbing it over the whole piece. They placed the bread in an oven on broil until crispy, or if it was really nice outside, over the grill to cook. I preferred this latter method of grilling the bread, but I have used the broil method for wintery days.
Using this process, the bread is resurrected from a tasteless and useless state to one of intense flavor, with a crispy outside texture and chewy to soft center inside. I ate this bread with slices of "jamon serrano" - quite literally a leg of pork that dries on your counter top from which you take chunks of meat from. The closest thing to jamon serrano I’ve found at typical grocery or butcher stores is Italian prociutto. Lay that on top of this bread with fresh slices of brie or manchego cheese and you’ve got yourself a heck of a "bocadillo" - a little streetside vendor type sandwich popular throughout Spain.
Now a bit about tomatoes: use vine ripened if you can. They are sweeter and have a lot more juice than steak tomatoes. Also, never ever put your tomatoes in the refrigerator! Exposing them to the cold air causes the sugars to arrest and the tomato completely loses flavor.
And for the olive oil: What I learned from Berta is that the greener olive oils are used most commonly in Spain in all their raw glory - that is, with fresh bread, or atop salad greens, or as a base for a dressing. The green olive oils tend to be cloudy and pungent and are wonderful fresh, but not so great for cooking. More about olive oils next time.
Finally the bread: Use french bread loaves as they tend to hold up better on the grill or under the broiler. Also, if it is too stale, it simply won’t work. If you don’t eat all your bread the day you buy it, store it in a plastic grocery bag up to a week if you plan on making it into pan de tomate.
