At a glance
2 slices
EasyOne pan, no technique to learn first.
- Prep
- 5 min
- Cook
- 3 min
- Total
- 8 min
- Serves
- 2
A Catalan pa amb tomàquet has bread, tomato, oil, and salt, and it is one of the great things you can eat. This is a northern-European corruption of it with butter in place of some of the oil, and it is the thing I make most often for lunch when there is nothing in the house.
Cold butter, in slices
The instinct is to spread. Do not. Cut the butter into thin slabs with a knife and lay them on the toast — the underside melts into the hot crumb and seals it, while the top of each slice stays cool and solid. When you bite through, you get warm buttered bread and cold salted butter in the same mouthful, and it is much better than either alone.
This only works with genuinely cold butter, so it comes out of the fridge at the last second.
Salting the tomato first
Two minutes with salt on it does two things: it seasons the tomato all the way through rather than only on the surface, and it draws out a little juice which then gets poured back over. The same principle as the tomato salad, on a smaller scale and a shorter clock.
Sesame, toasted
Sesame is here for texture and for a nutty note that flatters the tomato in a way that basil, the obvious choice, does not. But it has to be toasted — raw sesame is faintly bitter and contributes almost nothing.
Two minutes in a dry pan, moving constantly, until they colour and start to pop.
Ingredients
Method
4 steps
Slice the tomatoes and salt them
Cut the tomatoes into 5mm rounds, lay them on a plate, and salt them. Leave them there while the bread toasts — two minutes is enough to draw out some juice and season them through.
Toast, then butter immediately
Toast the bread until dark at the edges and lay the thin slices of cold butter straight onto it. Do not spread it. It should half-melt and leave the rest as flecks.
Tomato on top, juice and all
Layer the tomato rounds over the butter, overlapping, and pour any juice from the plate over them.
Sesame, oil, salt, pepper
Scatter the sesame seeds, add a thread of olive oil, and finish with more flaky salt and a lot of black pepper. Cut it in half and eat it over the sink.
Cook's notes
- Cold butter in slices, not spread. Half of it melts into the toast and half stays as cool, salty pockets, and that contrast is the point.
- Room-temperature tomatoes only. A cold tomato is a texture, not a flavour.
- Toast the sesame yourself in a dry pan for two minutes. Untoasted seeds taste of nothing.
- Keeps
- No. Eat it immediately, standing up.
