Tomato and bread salad with anchovies and capers

Photo by Chloe

Ottolenghi simple, 310pp.
by Yotam Ottolenghi with Tara Wigley and Esme Howarth
Ebury Press, London, 2018
Cooking on page 32

I’m delighted to share another guest recipe. This time from Chloe.

These days it is rare for me to buy a brand new cookbook. I have so many that I resist paying full price for one. That said, for a couple months I circled Yotam Ottolenghi’s new book in the shops and finally bought it. The recipe on page 32, along with a wealth of others, was way too tempting.

Turns out both Chloe and I bought this cookbook. Remember Chloe? She made the amazing negroni tart, the buttermilk cake with strawberries and a bunch of other page-32 recipes either with or for me.

It also turns out that Chloe and I made the page-32 recipe in this book on almost the same night. Chloe was quick to send me photographs and her How it played out and Verdict spiels. Her photos are identified in the caption. I’ve typed the Ingredients and Method and added my two-cents worth at the end.

So here goes.

Photo by Chloe

Tomato and bread salad with anchovies and capers

Ingredients
4 garlic cloves, crushed
6 anchovy fillets in oil, drained and finely chopped
110ml olive oil
100g sourdough, crusts left on, sliced 2cm thick, lightly toasted, then cut into 4cm chunks
500g ripe tomatoes, cut into 4cm chunks
1 lemon, finely grate the zest to get 1 tsp, then juice to get 2 tsp
1 tbsp capers, roughly chopped
5g parsley leaves, finely chopped
5g basil leaves, finely chopped, plus a few extra leaves to serve
1 tsp Urfa chilli flakes (or 1/2 tsp of another chilli flakes)
flaked sea salt

Photo by Chloe

Method
Put the first three ingredients into a medium saucepan, along with 1/2 teaspoon of flaked salt, and place on a low heat. (In the recipe’s introduction, Ottolenghi recommends using a range of colourful tomatoes.) Cook gently for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the garlic and anchovies soften when mashed with the back of a spoon.

Make sure not to heat the oil too much or the garlic will burn: if it does start to bubble, just remove it from the heat until it cools. After 10 minutes, remove the pan from the heat and add the tasted sourdough chunks to the hot oil. Toss the bread around until well coated, then transfer the bread to a large bowl. Leave the anchovy and garlic oil in the pan.

Mix together the tomatoes, lemon zest, lemon juice, capers, parsley and basil.

Once ready to assemble, add the tomato mixture to the bowl of bread. Carefully toss everything together, then transfer to a platter or serving dish. Drizzle over the remaining anchovy and garlic oil and finish with the chilli flakes.

Photo by Chloe

How it played out (by Chloe)
It’s definitely tomato season and a lovely woman on my local community Facebook page was offering tomatoes from her garden, I picked them fresh about an hour before I made the salad; they were perfect. All golf-ball-sized cherry tomatoes—not the variety the recipe suggested but I wasn’t going to buy tomatoes when good ones were going for free!

I also got fresh basil from the same woman’s garden. Parsley came from a pot of it I have growing here, lemon from my tree and I had the staples of anchovy, capers and garlic in my fridge (I use minced garlic from a jar because life’s too short to chop garlic and get stinky hands!) I also used regular chilli flakes rather than the exotic variety suggested.
One of the friends coming to dinner brought the end of a stale loaf of ‘rustic rye’ bread, not sourdough but similar enough to do the job and another case of ‘want not waste not’.

I followed the directions of the recipe and it turned out as expected, I probably wasn’t precise with ingredient quantities but a salad is forgiving like that and more capers are always better. 🙂

Verdict (by Chloe)
My friends loved it as well and it was delicious the next day for lunch the bread chunks were soggy but still very tasty. I’d definitely make this recipe again and recommend it to anyone else with fresh tomatoes and stale bread to use up.

Two cents from Peggy
I made this pretty much the same way as Chloe with homegrown tomatoes and stale sourdough rye bread. It’s true that more capers are always better. Same goes for anchovies (although anchovy haters could leave them out).

We loved this salad and I will make it often. I always have a hunk of stale sourdough bread. I served my version with two other sensational page-32 recipes—coming soon.