Pomodori gratinati (Gratinéed Tomatoes)

Frank16 September 2023sides/contorno, starters/antipasti42 Comments

It’s a bittersweet time of year this, as the summer comes to a close. Autumn is my favorite time of year. (Or at least it used to be before the advent of gas powered leaf blowers. Don’t get me started…) And yet, as I get older, I find that I appreciate summers more and more, with its longer days, easy going lifestyle and casual outdoor eating. And its wonderful produce, which begins to disappear from our local markets just about now. Among other things, it’s summer when you can find fresh tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes.

As we all know, tomatoes are omnipresent in Italian cookery, especially in sauces, but curiously there are surprisingly few traditional recipes where they take center stage. There’s tomatoes stuffed with rice or tuna—but even those are really as much about the filling as they are about the tomato. And then there’s Tomato Tonnato—which again is mostly about the tonnato sauce— and, of course, tomato salad. But that’s really just about it.

Here’s another one of those exceptional dishes that really lets tomatoes shine: pomodori gratinati, or Gratinéed Tomatoes. The tomatoes are cut in half, purged of their excess liquid, topped with seasoned breadcrumbs and roasted in a hot oven. Oven roasting softens the tomatoes and intensifies their flavor, meanwhile the topping browns and crisps up, creating a pleasing contrast in textures. The seasonings—typically garlic and fresh herbs, plus capers and anchovies if you like—perfectly complement and elevate the tomatoes without overwhelming it.

If you want to enjoy tomatoes for their own sake, pomodori gratinati is the dish for you. I can’t think of a more fitting way to bid farewell to the last of the summer crop.

Ingredients

Serves 6

6 medium-sized round tomatoes
150g (5 oz) breadcrumbs, preferably homemade (see Notes)
2 heaping Tbs capers, rinsed and squeezed dry
3-4 anchovy fillets, chopped
2-3 garlic cloves, peeled and finely minced
a few sprigs of parsley and/or basil, finely minced
olive oil
Salt and pepper

Directions

Cut the tomatoes in half horizontally. Scoop out the ribs, seeds and juices from the insides of each half tomato, taking care to leave the outside shell unbroken. After salting the insides of the tomatoes, drain them upside down on a rack for at least an hour. Chop up the pulp and set in a bowl with its juices.

Meanwhile, make your topping. Place the breadcrumbs in a mixing bowl and add the capers, anchovies, garlic, parsley and/or basil, salt, pepper and a drizzle of olive oil. Mix everything together and moisten to taste with a few spoonfuls of the reserved tomato pulp and its juices. Taste and adjust for seasoning.

When the tomatoes have finished draining, turn them right-side up and fill the insides of each tomato half loosely with the breadcrumb topping. Place them in a well greased baking dish or sheet.

Drizzle the tomatoes generously with olive oil and bake them in a hot (200C/400C) for a good half hour, or until they are golden brown on top.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

Notes

You can make pomodori gratinati with more or less any type of tomato other than very small ones like cherry or grape tomatoes. Francesconi calls for large, round tomatoes, but I actually find that medium sized ones work best, providing the most appealing tomato-to-topping ratio. Round tomatoes are easiest to deal with, but plum tomatoes, cut lengthwise rather than horizontally, also work fine.

Do make sure, however, that your tomatoes are ripe and full of flavor. The topping does provides savor, but it’s meant to complement the tomato not replace it. Your best bet for good tomatoes, as always, is your local farmers’ market or roadside vegetable stand. And (in my area at least) some supermarkets have a section for local produce.

Variations

As you might have guessed, there’s lots of room for playing around with the topping for your pomodori gratinati. The most basic versions are simple garlicky breadcrumbs, without the capers or anchovies. Some call for oregano rather than basil.

And then there’s the eternal question: cheese or no cheese? Many recipes call for grated parmigiano-reggiano or pecorino, but personally I think aged cheese is overkill for this already heady mixture. That said, a few cubes of a mild cheese like mozzarella, placed in the tomato shells before the topping, certainly wouldn’t hurt.

The exact amount of the topping can also vary a lot. It’s a matter of personal taste, really. Francesconi calls for only 4 spoonfuls of breadcrumbs for over a kilo of tomatoes, so you get just enough topping for a lightl sprinkling. But most recipes these days have you basically fill them up, which obviously takes a lot more. I prefer that approach, though since I leave the topping loose it doesn’t overwhelm the tomato by any means.

Making Homemade Breadcrumbs

Your pomodori gratinati will be exponentially better in both taste and texture if you use your own homemade breadcrumbs. Happily, in this age of food processors they’re super-easy to make.

But you do need to use the right kind of bread, the kind that goes stale after a few days. In the States, these are usually breads labeled as “French” or “Italian”. These breads are lean, i.e. they are made with flour, water, salt and yeast, without any butter or egg enrichment. And crucially, the bread must not contain any preservatives (typically calcium propionate, sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate or sorbic acid) which—obviously—are added to prevent it from going stale. These preserved and enriched breads get moldy rather than go stale.

To make breadcrumbs from stale bread, cut it into smallish cubes, then whiz the cubes in a food processor using the pulse function. Break the bread down little by little until you have the consistency that you want. For this recipe, I prefer crumbs that are still quite rough, more like pebbles than sand. To this end, preferably the bread should be too stale to eat but not yet rock-hard. Rock hard bread tends to pulverize into very find crumbs. I like my topping to have some texture to it.

If you don’t have homemade breadcrumbs, then panko is better than standard for its texture, though you can of course use regular breadcrumbs in a pinch. Just make sure they are “plain”, unflavored breadcrumbs. You want to flavor them yourself!

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