Pan con Tomate with Olives
Catalonia's morning ritual: bread rubbed with garlic, grated tomato and a generous pour of olive oil.
- Time
- 15 minutes
- Serves
- 4
- Level
- Easy
- Cuisine
- Spanish
In Catalonia it is called pa amb tomàquet — "bread with tomato" — and it is one of the plainest and most eaten things in Spain: at breakfast, as a tapa, alongside dinner, at any hour of the day.
Nothing in the recipe is cooked and nothing is mixed. Which means all four ingredients have to be good on their own: real bread, ripe tomatoes, fresh garlic and good olive oil. Catalonia generally uses Arbequina — a small-fruited variety, soft, fruity and low in bitterness; a sharp, pungent oil would step in front of the tomato here.
Directions
- Toast the bread slices on both sides on a griddle or in a toaster.
- Rub the surface of the hot bread with a clove of garlic — it will melt into the crust.
- Grate the tomatoes on the coarse side of a grater and discard the skins.
- Spread the grated tomato over the bread.
- Pour over plenty of olive oil and sprinkle with coarse salt.
- Serve with green Manzanilla olives alongside.
Tips & storage
The garlic is rubbed on hot bread. The porous surface of toast works like a grater and the clove melts across it. On cooled bread this does not happen; the garlic simply slides.
Grate the tomato, don't slice it. A coarse grater takes the flesh and leaves the skin in your hand. Sliced tomato slides off the bread and never soaks in.
The garlic can be optional. In some parts of Catalonia it is left out altogether. For those who want less, a single light pass is enough.
Be generous with the oil. Here the oil is not an ingredient but the main flavour. Don't measure it — pour.
Coarse salt, not fine. Large crystals are felt individually and give a point of texture against the wet ground of the tomato.
Assemble at the moment of serving. Bread spread in advance softens within ten minutes. Bringing the components to the table for everyone to build their own is the Catalan way.
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