Bruschetta: our ace in the hole

Are you coming back from work and it’s too late to be busy cooking? That’s exactly what serves your purpose! A time-saving and couldn’t-be-easier recipe!

Enjoyed as an appetizer any time of the year, bruschetta is both served in Italian restaurants and homemade. Since the basic recipe with chopped tomato topping is well-known, we want to introduce you the richer Sicilian version of bruschetta.

Ingredients of Bruschetta

Here’s what you need:

• bread with sesame seeds on. As many slices as you need to fill you up; (TIP: a thick-crusty and soft-crumbed bread is better for bruschetta)

• fresh cherry tomatoes;

• celery;

• black olives;

• capers;

• onions;

• parsley;

• hot red pepper;

• extra-virgin olive oil and white vinegar;

• salt and pepper to taste.

(Note: there’s no quantity as it depends on how many slices you have)

Preparation of Bruschetta

Grill the slices of bread on a grill pan or in the oven until golden brown. Chop the tomatoes, remove any excess juice and place them into a bowl. Finely mince the celery, black olives, capers, onions, parsley and add to the tomatoes. Salt it, add some hot red pepper, drizzle oil and vinegar and stir well.

Soak the slices of bread with oil and vinegar and top with the mixture we’ve just made. That’s it! A colorful, intense-flavored appetizer that combines the crunchiness of the bread with a soft topping. So yummi!

A little bit of history about Bruschetta

Sicilian cuisine is indeed like that: a great collage of ingredients coming from all over Europe and the world that were skillfully matched and mixed to create multi-colored and tasty dishes!

It can be considered as a “creole” cuisine, as a result of all the contributions by Greeks, Romans, and above all Arabs, Jews and Normans in the Middle Ages.

Known as the “lemon/orange land”, besides citrus fruit, Sicily is now famous for its wine and olives too, that were brought by Greeks and found fertile ground to grow. We owe to Arabs most of the ingredients of nowadays Sicilian delicacies: sugar cane to make all the delightful sweets; rice to make arancini; orange and lemon culture; spices and herbs like cinnamon, oregano, rosemary, saffron.

Jews, instead, left their art of “eating properly”. They introduced, for example, the garlic mirepoix to make tomato sauce and sauté vegetables to make them tastier. And thanks to Normans, who came from northern Europe and were good hunters, Sicilian cuisine was enriched with game besides new cooking techniques.

And yours? Are your country cuisine so mixed alike?

Sources

it.wikipedia.org - Cucina siciliana
All images released under Creative Commons license.