Panzanella: Weeknight or Wow
It's a great weeknight meal, quick and easy and a terrific thing to do with leftover bread. But you can also take basically the same ingredients, not toss them together, and produce a similarly delicious and very striking Heirloom Tomato Platter With Gorgonzola—just the thing to begin a fancier weekend meal, or to set out on the buffet at a casual party. It would also make a fast but glam offering for a work party, if your friends and family were coming over to help you paint or garden or move furniture, and they needed something to pick at all afternoon. I would say it’s not suitable for a really formal affair, because you don’t want fresh tomato juice and extra virgin olive oil up the sleeves of your tuxedo.
The key to this dish is good ingredients, starting with tomatoes. Try to choose a variety of shapes, colors and sizes to add interest to the platter. A high quality olive oil, like DeLallo Extra Virgin or Organic Extra Virgin, is also important here, because it mixes with the juice of the tomatoes and becomes their sauce, really enhancing the flavor and bringing all the elements of the dish together. I used a Mountain Piccante style Gorgonzola, but you can use whatever cheese accords with how stinky you like your bleu. I also had a red Florence onion from the garden, a beautifully tapered long bulb, so I used that, sliced very, very thin. I hardly ever eat raw onion or garlic any more—it’s just TMI about alliums—but the sharp accent of the tiny slices contrasted really well with all those savory, smooth tomato, cheese and olive flavors. The finished platter needed some green I thought, so I added the capers, which also brought in that little vinegary spike you find in many good salads.
Putting an Heirloom Tomato Platter together takes hardly any time at all. You just slice the tomatoes and onion, arrange them on the platter, toss the little tomatoes with some olive oil, pour over top of the big slices, sprinkle the cheese and capers over all, grill the bread and you’re done. If you are sitting down immediately to eat the whole platter, you can serve the toasts right among the tomatoes, which is rustic and convivial, but if you’re setting the plate out for people to pick at for any length of time, serve the bread separately because otherwise it gets soggy. You will also want a little garnish bowl of gorgonzola alongside so when the first people to serve themselves descend on the slices with all the cheese, there’s still some left for you.
In the event that you have any tomato mosh left over, it is a wonderful thing to heat up just until the juice has mostly evaporated and then toss with some hot pasta and a few more sprinkles of cheese.
RECIPE: Heirloom Tomato Platter with Gorgonzola
