Stewed Aubergine and Tomato Crostinis

   The tomato sauce recipe that I stewed the aubergine in is my own recipe, that I have developed over the last few years. I believe that anyone who takes cooking seriously should be able to knock up a good, solid tomato sauce, as it is a basic ingredient in so many dishes, from a good homemade spaghetti bolognese to a pizza base sauce.
   I am a complete purist when it comes to making a tomato sauce, I don't add chilli, or pancetta as some people do, and most of the time I don't even add herbs or garlic (although I did this time, as they lent themselves to the type of dish I was making), and prefer to focus more on the taste of good quality tomatoes.


   Right, the absolute starting point or any tomato sauce is to find some good quality tomatoes. The better the quality, the better the final taste will be. Here are some tips when buying tomatoes for your sauce.

- In my opinion, the best tomatoes in the world are San Marzano tomatoes from Italy, you can find them in most supermarkets, and the ones in Waitrose are usually the best.

- Always use tomatoes that come packaged on the vine, this ensures that they remain full of flavour for as long as possible.

- Smell them. Most if not all packaged tomatoes have small holes in the packaging that you can use to smell them before buying, and to keep them from sweating in the plastic. They should smell fruity and deep, with a rich homegrown aroma, like your grandmother's greenhouse. I find that San Marzanos have an almost balsamic richness to them.

- Colour. They should be a deep, blood red. It's not a must, but I find that the colour tends to reflect the flavour, the deeper the colour, the deeper the flavour!


   The first stage of making your sauce, that is if you don't want your sauce to be full of tomato skins, is to blanch them in boiling salted water for one minute, and the straight away run them under cold water to make them easier to handle.

   Now peel off the skins, this should be a piece of cake as blanching the tomatoes makes the skin pretty much fall off.

   The next stage is not to chop the tomatoes, but to squeeze them with your bare hands into the saucepan, this will ensure that you extract lots of good flavour from them, rather than just slicing through them and keeping most of the juice still inside. You may want to be careful though, as the juices do tend to go absolutely everywhere!
   In this recipe, I added the squeezed tomatoes to a saucepan with some olive oil, garlic and roughly chopped sage leaves, but unless you are doing this recipe, I would just cook them on their own.

   A good piece of advice for this stage, is to put the vine stalks from the tomatoes into the pan, and cook them into the sauce until right at the last moment before serving, as this imparts a really meaty powerful tomato flavour to the sauce.
   You should also add a ladleful of water, 50ml of balsamic vinegar and one roughly chopped aubergine to the pan, and cook with the lid on for about 20-25 minutes.

   Once the sauce has thickened up nicely, spoon it generously onto slices of either toasted ciabatta or toasted rye bread like I did, and drizzle on some reduced balsamic vinegar. Smashed it.