How Yotam Ottolenghi Makes the Most of Tomatoes

In this smart, simple recipe, he soaks up every last drop with pan-toasted sourdough.

When I was 12, my best friend and I would go to his house after school on most days. We’d have cornflakes as a snack. Cornflakes! In big bowls with fridge-cold milk. We didn’t have this in my house — definitely not in the afternoon — so it felt like a passport into someone else’s far more thrilling childhood. Other people’s houses are like that when you’re a child, a whole different model of normal behind another front door.

Recipe: Miso Tomato Toasts With Shichimi Togarashi

The best part wasn’t the cereal, but what was left after: the milk at the bottom, gone sweet and malty, thickened with whatever had dissolved into it. Sugar and fat and cold, all at once. I’d polish mine off faster than intended, and if my friend had any left in his own bowl, I’d see to that, too.

My friend’s mother was a keen baker, and there were cookies she’d made in a tin box on the kitchen shelf. I always wished that I could have one with my cold milk but unfortunately, that wasn’t an option. Too much indulgence so close to dinnertime, I suppose.

Years later, I visited Christina Tosi’s Momofuku Milk Bar in New York City and tried her cereal milk, a genius thing that packaged my nostalgia. I tried it, loved it and this time got a chance to dip a cookie in it, one of Christina’s, obviously.

Growing up, the equivalent of the bowl of cornflakes at my house was a bowl of salad: chunky tomatoes, some cucumbers, spring onion or garlic, picked herbs, vinegar and lots of olive oil. It, too, left behind a pool of liquid once all the eating was done, which was also at grave risk of being poured down the sink if no one bothered to save it. And once again, I was the eager beaver, drinking it straight from the bowl or, even better, dunking bread into it (this was allowed).

I had been an adult for a long time, free to make my own decisions about what’s right and what’s not, before I allowed myself the equivalent of Christina’s cereal milk. It felt wrong, I suppose — too extravagant? — to be skipping the whole salad and focusing on soggy bread that just swallowed a lake of juices. I couldn’t quite bring myself there.

It was a gradual process of discovery: first, noticing the magic of fattoush, dakos and panzanella, three tomato-heavy salads that include bread, which soaks up the juices as you eat. But while they’re all delicious, they don’t quite hit the spot in the same way; lots of veggie fiber dilutes the power of the soggy bread, which never gets properly soaked.

Italian tomato bruschetta and Spanish and Catalan pan con tomate get you closer, the bread rubbed with garlic and smothered with broken or crushed tomato and olive oil. I love them, but they still lack the vinegar of my childhood salad and the way it interacts with the tomatoes, oil and salt, breaking down the fruit and releasing its juices.

Today’s miso tomatoes on sourdough take me one step closer to the pure “bottom of the salad bowl” experience. The flavors are pretty different — there’s more umami from miso and seaweed and the fruitiness of an orange — but there’s enough juice and oil and broken bits of tomato soaked into every piece of bread that I totally get the thrill. Dregs to riches, excuse the pun.

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