You can (as I’m sure you know) skip the liquidiser part and just chop up the tomatoes with or without skinning them first - it depends on whether you like your sauce lumpy or smooth, bearing in mind that all the above ingredients - apart from tomatoes and olive oil - are negotiable.
Notes on Catalonia’s pa amb tomaquet
A combination such as bread and tomato, surely the world’s simplest national dish, depends on the quality of the ingredients and the care with which they’re assembled. In land-of-origin, what might be hoped for is a thick slab of dense-crumbed country bread, pan candeal (baked in a wood-oven), new season’s garlic (mild and sweet), olive oil (freshly pressed from someone’s cousin’s olive-trees), and a supply of rubbing-tomatoes, one per serving of bread.
Rubbing-tomatoes - tomaquetts de ramellet, aka hanging-tomatoes, since they’re preserved from autumn to spring by suspending them on the vine from a hook in a current of air - are valued for fragance, flavour and viscocity rather than colour, juiciness and sweetness. As is usual in Mediterranean markets, you’re more likely to find them on one of the little unofficial stalls set up outside the market that specialise in local produce in season - the first figs, green walnuts, orange-tears from the woods.
From mid-autumn until Christmas, you might notice a hank or two of greenish tomatoes trailing a loop of string. They’ll look like nothing much - uneven in size and shape, maybe a little dusty - a person would pay good money for, let alone two or three times as much as the most perfect tomatoes in the market. And if curiosity tempts you to buy, you’ll realise why. These are no ordinary tomatoes. They are tomatoes as they ought to taste, withy chewy flesh, sweet thick juice, and an astonishingly powerful fragrance. The tomatoes grown on the lava-flow of Mount Vesuvius are the only others that come close.
If you order your bread and tomato somewhere where the locals take their late breakfast or mid-morning break, you will observe, if the place knows its business and hasn’t succumbed to the need to please outsiders, that all five elements - bread, salt, tomatoes, garlic, olive oil - will be served separately on a board with a short-handed knife.
Catalans don’t like being told what to do - in food as in life. Decisions must now be made on whether the garlic clove should left whole for ease of rubbing, or if you prefer it slivered for sprinkling, or pressed with the back of the knife for spreading. And if rubbed, whether this should be done before or after applying the oil, bearing in mind that a garlic clove rubbed onto hard crumb transfer nothing but sweet, mild juice, and that if spreading or sprinkling, the garlic is best applied after the olive oil, when the crumb is already softened.
The final decision involves the tomato itself. Cut the fruit in half, stem to stern, for ease of squeezing. Now, holding it skin-side down in the palm of your hand, rub the cut side over the crumb and discard the emptied-out skin. You may, if you like, rub both sides of the bread. It all depends on personal choice…but don’t let the decisions of others dictate what you do. Just please yourself.
And by the way, more tomato-talk will be on its way shortly to my much-appreciated paid subscribers - tap the button to join the gang!
p.s. You’ll find my fruit and veg prints on my website - https://www.elisabethluard.org/shop-1
Evocative to my taste buds. Tomatoes are life.
I could just eat and enjoy that now. Thank you