Tapas on Toast: the Spanish Montadito

Montaditos are a type of small-plate, open-faced Spanish sandwich. Like tapas, they are often served with drinks, sometimes as a complimentary snack (to help you keep drinking!) There’s no specific recipe. It’s simply a thin slice of bread, brushed or drizzled with oil and toasted, then “mounted” with a combination of ingredients and often finished off with a final drizzle of good olive oil.

Montaditos take their simplest form in pan con tomate or tomato bread. Of Catalan origin, it’s more properly called Pa Amb Tomàquet but I’m already in over my head navigating the Spanish, so pan con tomate it is. Some of the recipes I’ve read recommend simply cutting a tomato in half and rubbing the cut end over the toast, but I like Kenji’s method (surprise!) of instead rubbing a cut clove of garlic on the bread, and grating the cut side of a tomato to make a pulp, discarding the skin.

tomato pulp

After rubbing on the garlic and spooning on some tomato pulp, the tomato bread is finished with some sea salt and olive oil.

Pan con tomate

Luckily our garden has been turning out tomatoes by the bucketload for the past month or so. Sadly, that will soon come to an end, but until it does, I’m keeping this recipe on speed dial. It’s simple, quick, and delicious. There’s a sharp hit of garlic but only a very thin layer sitting right at that intersection between the tomato pulp and the crisp but slowly disintegrating bread. It’s a thing to be made quickly and enjoyed quickly, for as long as you can get fresh tomatoes.

More commonly, Montaditos involve a variety of flavorful ingredients stacked on the toast and skewered with a toothpick if the stack gets too high. Common ingredients include Spanish chorizo, jamon serrano, manchego cheese, olives, pickled peppers… Seafood such as smoked salmon or anchovies are sometimes used. Various pickles. Goat cheese. Roasted vegetables. Montaditos can be made by simply taking some nice antipasto type ingredients from your fridge and combining them in interesting ways on toast.

A note: most of the following ideas were inspired by combinations found on this page, which is mostly a way to sell their Spanish food products but also has some damn tasty looking things on it.

manchego cheese, chorizo, marinated mushroom, olive

If you’re going to do Montaditos, you’re going to have to do the stack of ingredients that don’t want to stack at some point, and I got it out of the way right off the bat. In this situation, the toothpick is your friend. Manchego cheese can range from sweet and nutty to quite sharp depending on the age–this was on the younger end of the spectrum, and went well with the smoky, salty, paprika flavor of the chorizo. The earthiness of the mushroom and the bitter salty olive weren’t the best pairing to finish it off, but on the whole it wasn’t a bad start.

manchego cheese, fig jam

Manchego is often paired with membrillo, or Spanish quince paste. Fig jam is a reasonable substitute. This was a very nice combination, the mild, slightly salty and nutty cheese against the sweet but dark, almost musky flavor of the fig jam. There’s a small sandwich chain in Chicago called Hannah’s Bretzel that has a similar combination in a sandwich, a serrano ham and manchego cheese sandwich on pretzel bread with fig chutney and shaved fennel.

Serrano Manchego sandwich from Hannah’s Bretzel

When I tried making this Montadito with the addition of jamon serrano though, it didn’t quite fare as well as I’d hoped. Perhaps the ham threw off the balance, or maybe it was missing the crisp, slightly bitter vegetal addition the fennel provided. Jamon Serrano worked better as an enhancement to the simple pan con tomate.

Pan con tomate y jamon serrano

This was a great combination. Cured pork and tomatoes means a big hit of mouth-filling umami, and the texture was nice, though as before, the tomato bread softened up the longer it sat. Some sharp acidic pickled vegetable would go well here too as a contrast.

goat cheese, smoked salmon

Goat cheese and smoked salmon is a natural. The goat cheese is, in texture and flavor, somewhat similar to cream cheese, and while the toasted baguette slice was nothing like a bagel, some capers would still have really put it over the top.

olive spread, anchovy, tomato

Probably the least liked combination of the afternoon was this olive spread, anchovy, and tomato Montadito. I used a nice garden fresh San Marzano style plum tomato, and the quality of everything was very good, but altogether it was a very intense bite, with the salty bitterness of the olive spread compounded by the extreme saltiness of the anchovy, with the tomato slice not strong enough to referee the matchup.

There are a ton of possible combinations–there’s a restaurant chain out of Spain (with a US presence, though sadly their Chicago-area location closed before I got to it) called 100 Montaditos, after all, and I’m sure they’ve barely scratched the surface. Tomato bread has surely made its way onto my permanent menu, and I can think of plenty of times when I’ve had odds and ends of various ingredients that would have made a spectacular random pile of stuff on toast.

Each combination I made, I thought of ways I could have improved it. I could probably spend months making Montaditos and not reach the end of the rabbit hole. It’s time to look forward, though. We’ve got some more amazing sandwiches coming up in the months ahead.

Jim Behymer

I like sandwiches.

I like a lot of other things too but sandwiches are pretty great