Pan con tomate, or pan tumaca, is about as simple as Spanish food gets, and also one of the most telling — there's no sauce, no technique to hide behind, just bread, tomato, garlic and good olive oil.
It's the dish Spaniards eat for breakfast as often as as a tapa.
Ingredients
- 1 baguette or rustic sourdough loaf, sliced on an angle
- 3 very ripe tomatoes
- 2 garlic cloves, halved
- Extra virgin olive oil, for drizzling
- Sea salt flakes, to taste
Method
- Toast or grill the bread slices until golden and crisp on both sides.
- While still warm, rub each slice firmly with the cut side of a garlic clove.
- Halve the tomatoes and rub the cut side directly onto the bread, pressing so the pulp and juice soak into the toast — discard the skins once squeezed dry.
- Drizzle generously with good olive oil and finish with a few flakes of sea salt.
- Eat immediately, while the bread is still warm and crisp underneath the tomato. There is no version of this dish that improves with waiting.
This dish lives or dies on the tomatoes — use the ripest, most flavourful ones you can find. There's nowhere for a mediocre tomato to hide here.
This is the home version
What you've just read works on a normal stove. At a Tapas Madriz event it's the same dish, the same method, just cooked live in front of a crowd — and we clean up, not you.
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