Broiled Cheesy Tomatoes

It is tomato season here and I’m starting to reap the rewards of a couple of wonderful heirloom tomato plants. Likewise, our local farmer’s market has a cheese vendor [again -- she went missing for a while] who sells the tastiest cheddars and parmesan-esque cheeses.

Here is a delicious dish made from the two:

• Thin slice one large, very ripe, heirloom or heirloom style tomato
• Lay the slices out, evenly spaced and not touching, on a cookie sheet (Lacking a silpat, oil the pan first).
• Lightly salt and pepper the tomato
• Grate or thinly slice some kind of parmesan or parmesan-like cheese over the top of the tomato slices. I used an artisan cannonball cheese from the local farmer’s market. Something relatively dry and crumbly, but not totally dry.
• Put the oven on hi broil and place the cookie sheet on the highest shelf
• Cook long enough for the cheese to melt and then brown just slightly.

The end result is an explosion of hot juicy tomato with a crunchy cheese shell. Easy and awesome. I would have taken a picture of the result, but it didn’t last long enough to do so! Got pictures of before and after this time.

Update: OK — grated the cheese this time. Much better. And I thought I used more. However, the grated cheese has a lot of volume for very little content. Next time, I’ll about double the amount of cheese used.

And there will be a next time. These were delicious. Even better than last time. And, yes, those are huge slices of tomato.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Food, Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.