Tomato and anchovy bread

Or my version of the Catalan 'pan con tomate'

I love a typo like this one:

Gawd bless the Turkish supermarkets in London - cheery signs and brilliant tomatoes. As it’s boiling hot in London again, I’m only really interested in dishes that are the bare minimum of effort. I’ve been saving a couple of large tomatoes OUT of the fridge for a few days now, to make sure their flavour intensity is at the highest level, because a fridge cold tomato tastes of sadness. My local Turkish shop is getting a lot of business from me at the moment because they sell the best peaches and tomatoes - the owner tells me that he vets around 30 boxes of peaches at the wholesalers before he finds one he’s happy with. And the tomatoes are next level - all kinds of shapes and colours, like nothing you’d find in a supermarket.

For the dish above, which is my version of the Catalan snack ‘pan con tomate’, all you need is some tomatoes that have been hanging out at room temperature for a few hours, some salt, olive oil, garlic, crusty bread and optional fresh herbs and tinned anchovies, if you can countenance those. I love ALL the salty things, so this is like umami-heaven, and is just as good as a great slice of pizza. Takes a fraction of the time, too, and no oven action.

One summer I became so obsessed with this dish that I ate pretty much nothing else for a fortnight, and even took a tub of tomatoes and slices of bread to a friend’s birthday picnic so that I could assemble this to order…I was prepared to face ridicule, but that never happened and people were just really happy to eat this snack from a strange woman sitting on a picnic blanket with a huge tomato and a cheese grater!! (I left the antisocial anchovies at home, though).

Makes 2 large slices.

You will need:

2 slices of crusty / sourdough bread, very lightly toasted
1 clove garlic
2 large tomatoes at room temperature
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt (sea salt is great)
Fresh herbs (I used marjoram)
A few halved anchovy fillets from a tin

First, half each tomato and grate it into pulp using a box cheese grater over a bowl - skin side out, flesh against the scrapy-bit. Discard the tomato skins. To the pulp, add 1/2 teaspoon of salt, a few shakes of olive oil and stir. Halve your garlic clove and rub it all over each slice of bread. Just before you’re ready to eat - and you’ll need to be QUICK because the tomato soaks into the bread and can’t lie around - add dollops of tomato mixture onto the bread, drape across a few anchovies, sprinkle over a few herbs and a little more oil, and shove immediately into your mouth. This snack does NOT hang around as the bread will become soggy quite quickly. Not a problem!