bruschetta

brushetta is crostini or a small slice of hard bread, saturated with virgin olive oil, covered with diced tomatoes, garlic, and basil, and then doused with olive oil again.
Additional ingredients such as cilantro, red onion, smoked mozarella, grated parmesean or bits of kalamata olive are the prime candidates for extras. I have had a bruchetta recently that included roasted red pepper in its repertoir. Sun dried tomatoes on bruchetta is bizarre, although possibly delicious.

Canonical Bruschetta

(pron. broos-KET-tah), and remember strictly for the garlic lover.

Take a piece of bread. Nearly any crusty bread will do: a ciabatta would be great, French pain de campagne or even baguette is fine.
Toast the bread until it develops a somewhat hard cut surface. Take a garlic clove, and rub it on the cut surface: the garlic should be abraded, and spread itself on the bread.
This will release invisible but powerful clouds of garlic vapors.
Once the bread has been garlic-ed to your taste, add extravirgin olive oil (with moderation) and some salt. Eat hot. Don't add sun dried tomatoes, camel cheese, North Baltic sprat. Don't fuck with the bruschetta, and the bruschetta will not fuck with you (this should be said with a heavy Italian accent).

This is bruschetta the way we eat it in Italy. And of course, it can't have cilantro or kalamata olives on top, since neither ingredient is Italian. I would also avoid the parmigiano, a cheese deserving a better fate than violent contact with garlic.
Bruschetta is a great way for using stale bread. BTW crostini in Italy are little cubes of dried bread that you can add to soup (they work well in minestrone).

I have this wonderful book. I got it for Christmas a few years back, it never ceases to amaze me how great the recipes are, and yet how simple they are.

The recipe for bruschetta is:

• 1 long loaf of French Bread
• 1/4 cup of Olive Oil
• 3 cloves of Garlic minced.
• 3 ripe Roma tomatoes chopped as finely as possible
• 1 TBSP of Lemon Juice
• A handful of minced Basil
• 1 tsp of Salt

Chop everything up and add it all together (except for the oil). Let the tomato stuff stand for a while, turn on the oven to broil and go and cut the bread. It should be fairly dry, but not too dry. You want to cut it in half, and then in half the long ways so that you have four sections. Working on a cookie sheet, slather the bread in oil, make sure to cover it all liberally. Put the tomato mixture on it covering as much as possible, juice and all. Put the cookie sheet into the broiler for around four minutes (the broiler pan should be on the lowest height setting). Check after around four minutes, anything longer and it might burn.

Eat while hot.

This also tastes GREAT with a recipe I made up. For this recipe you will need:

• One bowl with the tomato mix for the bruschetta bread.
• Olive oil
• Eggplant
• Chicken, you will want one breast per person, and it cut into strips.
• More Basil
• Garlic

julienne the eggplant, and mince the garlic. Take a pan, heat it up, add some olive oil. Add the chicken when hot and sauté it. Remove the chicken from the pan to a bowl when it's hot. Add the tomato mix, garlic, eggplant, basil, and add more olive oil. Sauté the vegetables with a lid over the pan. Once the eggplant is limp add the chicken back in, add some more salt and pepper to taste, and stir good to heat the chicken back up. Serve with bruschetta.

It's really really yummy, and I bet it would taste good over angel hair pasta

Spicy Bruschetta

Bruschetta, pronounced bru-sket-tah (in Italian, ch is pronounced k), is an exceedingly simple dish with potentially infinite variations. Few appetizers go over quite so well with quite so little effort.

INGREDIENTS:
8 roma tomatoes
1 head garlic
3 serrano peppers
Fresh oregano, to taste
Fresh basil, to taste
Olive oil, sufficient to sauté
Chianti
One baguette
Parmigiano reggiano cheese, one medium-sized block

First, slice the tomatoes (relatively thinly). Chop the garlic finely, either mincing it or using a food processor. Thinly slice or use a food processor to chop the serranos. Chop or mince the oregano. (We'll save the basil for later on.)

Heat your oven to 375°F.

Heat the olive oil in your saucier or wok, until it begins to simmer. Once it's simmering, sauté the garlic until it takes on a golden-brown colour.

Then, add serrano peppers and the tomatoes, stirring them and breaking them up as you go.

Add oregano and chianti, to taste.

While the mixture simmers, grate or cut thin strips of the parmigiano reggiano. Slice the baguette into 1-1.5 cm slices, and brush olive oil onto one side of each slice, putting a good coating of the grated cheese or one or two strips of the sliced cheese on top. Place the baguette slices into the oven and broil them for five minutes.

After five minutes, or once the baguette slices have become toasted and the cheese has melted, spoon the mixture onto each of the slices. Rip off pieces of the basil leaves or place whole basil leaves on top of the mixture, and serve. Three slices serves one person.

Enjoy!

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Other items in Élise's Culinodes

Quick vegetarian pasta sauce --=-- Arrabbiata --=-- Sugo Napoli al balsamico