Bread with tomato: the number one Catalan comfort food. With some cheese, cured meat or omelette, we eat it for breakfast, lunch, snack, or dinner. The bread can be toasted or not, you can rub some garlic or not; the ingredients that are always present are a loaf of bread, a tomato to rub on it (here we have tomacons varieties, which are small and mostly juice), a drizzle of olive oil, and some salt.
It's simply called "bread with tomato" (pa amb tomàquet, pa amb tomata or pa amb tomaca in Catalan, depending on the area/dialect).
In this video by Daily Catalan (Instagram, TikTok), she shows you how her family makes ratafia, one of the most widespread Catalan liquors, which many families make at home with the ingredients they pick on Midsummer Night (Nit de Sant Joan).
Baked apples🍎 a very easy recipe, find it under the cut.
Photo from Restaurant la Deu (Olot).
Ingredients:
4 Golden apples
100 g of sugar (white or brown are both fine)
cinnamon powder
dessert wine (Moscatell, Malvasia...)
optional: crushed almonds or lemon peel
Preparation:
Preheat the oven at 180 ºC with heat from above and below.
Clean the apples with much water.
Remove the apple's heart. Be careful not to remove the bottom of the apple to avoid spilling the filling.
Place the apples on the tray.
Inside the whole at the apple's centre, add a spoon of sugar, some cinnamon powder, a drizzle of wine (don't worry if you're cooking for children, all the alcohol will evaporate in the oven), and if you want you can add a little piece of lemon peel or some almonds.
Bake the tray for 45-50 minutes approximately. How long you leave it depends how you like them, if you want them to melt you'll have to leave then between 1 and 2 hours. Every so often, take a look and stab them with a fork to see if they're soft enough or you want to leave them for longer.
Serve them and enjoy! You can eat them warm or cold, but most people prefer them warm.
Variations:
You can also add some water on the tray to help the wine evaporate.
You can skip the sugar, because baking the apple already makes it become sweeter.
If you made more than you can eat, you can keep them in the fridge. Saving them for later makes them get a stronger taste.
Ous amb pomata (eggs with tomato) is a typical recipe from L'Alguer and from some parts of the south of the Valencian Country. It's a very widespread food in these areas because of how simple it is and because it's made of cheap ingredients, historically allowing all the population to eat it.
This is the recipe:
Wash and peel the tomato. Cut the tomato and the onion into little pieces.
Drizzle some olive oil on the pan and add the tomato and onion. Add some thick salt. Cook it with the lid on the pan in high heat, stirring every so often. Add two fresh basil leafs.
When the tomato is melted, add the eggs and leave them to be cooked.
Serve warm with bread.
Photo by Carla Valentino for Ofici Lingüístic de l'Alguer, recipe in the same link.
