Recipe by Tomer Botner—Founder of Florentine Kitchen Knives


I started making knives as a final project in college, before I had any idea it would become what it became. The first thing I realised was that if I was going to make knives, I needed to actually know how to use them. So I took cutting classes. And when I had my first finished blades, I wanted to test them somewhere real — so I applied to work in a few restaurant kitchens. I ended up at Port Said, Eyal Shani's restaurant near the Great Synagogue in the centre of Tel Aviv.
 
At the time it was probably the busiest restaurant in the city. The food was simple — deliberately so — but extraordinarily good. Easy to execute, hard to forget. Eyal Shani now has more than thirty restaurants around the world, which tells you everything about what he figured out early.
 
Even so, the food was simple enough that I still got laid off after three months for being too slow. That was the end of my professional cooking career and the beginning of my professional knifemaking career. Much more comfortable timelines.
 
But a few things I learned there never left me. This is one of them.
It's a riff on pan con tomate — the Spanish original — but roasted, heavy-handed with olive oil, and buried under a mountain of tomatoes. The kind of dish that only works if the tomatoes are genuinely good. When they are, it's remarkable.


Making the Recipe 

This recipe is done entirely by eye. How many tomatoes, how much chili — that's yours to decide. The only rules: tomatoes love salt and the whole thing has to glisten with olive oil.

Ingredients (per serving)

1 thick slice sourdough
2–3 tomatoes, mixed varieties, cut into 5x5mm squares, skin on
1/2 meaty Thai chili, finely sliced
1 clove garlic
Olive oil, generously
Sea salt

Preparation

1. Slice the sourdough thick. Drizzle generously with olive oil and toast in a pizza oven, or in a regular oven at 200°C, until golden with some char on the edges.
2. While the bread is still warm, take a clove of garlic and graze it across the surface — just enough to leave its mark.
3. Cut the tomatoes into rough 5x5mm squares, skin on, mixed varieties if you have them.
4. Mix with finely sliced meaty Thai chilies (I prefer green but could only find Red ones this time), a very generous pour of olive oil, and enough salt to make it sing.
5. Pile it high on the toast. Don't be shy about the height.