butter toasted ciabatta; avocado and feta; quick pickled peppers; biltong
Cooking is a form of art. It asks the artist, that is, the chef, to think creatively but also critically about what they are putting on the plate. The same goes for the humble slice of bread. Wendy Leigh writing on the website FoodRepublic states this beautifully regarding tartine, the open-faced sandwich:
I really could not state it better, and that is exactly what it is. Tartines, or the humble slice of bread, is the creative chef's playground. I want to add, tartines are the gardener-chef's absolute fantasy. You can do so much with a humble slice of bread.
In this post, I want to share one such experiment. Playing with textures and flavours, I think this recipe is a winner for those who can access these ingredients.
So please follow along with me as I show you how I make this feta-avocado and biltong tartine! It is sweet and sour, savoury and zesty, and amplified by the crunchy toasted ciabatta.
Ingredient List/Recipe
The tartine I am making has relatively simple ingredients except for biltong. If you cannot find it, make it yourself! It is a very simple, high-protein snack you can eat on a daily basis, like most South Africans do! In this post I show you how easy it is to make it yourself. I used the following ingredients:
| - two smallish avocados, - one lemon (zest and juice), - one medium size block of feta cheese, - three small sweet peppers, - a couple of slices of bread, - two tsp of sugar, - two tsp of butter, - two tsp of olive oil, - salt, and - pepper. |  |
I also use my quick pickled peppers, which I usually make about 10 minutes before making the rest of the ingredients. For this, I simply add the lemon juice, two tsp of sugar, and all of the cut peppers. I have shared this recipe/method many times before and it is a go-to one I always use.
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Method/Process
I have wanted to make "whipped feta" for so long now, but I have never come around to it. Whilst thinking about lunch, I thought why not add feta cheese to the avocado? So I tried to make a type of "whipped" feta-avo spread with olive oil, lemon zest, and some of the quick pickle juice.
I threw everything in a bowl and just tried to whip it. Obviously, "whip" in this sense is a bit of a stretch of the word, but I did it in any case.
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The above image does not look like it worked, but most of our feta cheese in the shops is the crumbly type. But I persisted through it and it worked in some sense!
At this stage, I got everything ready, mise en place as they say. I cut the biltong in smaller pieces so that it is easier to eat.
After doing this, I toasted the bread with copious amounts of butter. Homemade bread toasted with butter on a cast iron pan is what it is all about. It just works so well.
Then it was time to make the tartines. The bottom layer consisted of the feta-avo mix I made. Here you can see it looks a bit better, in the sense that the mixture looked a bit more homogenous.
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The crispy toasted bread creates the perfect contrast to the soft avo-feta spread. But the salty butter and the little bit sweet and tangy of the avo-feta spread complement each other so well.
Then the final touches, the biltong and the pickled peppers. One adds the salt, the other the sweetness. One is chewy, the other is crunchy. It is all about balancing the flavours and texture.
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And then to top it off, I added some homegrown and freshly harvested wild rocket. The little bit of a burn and pepper aftertaste compliments the overall taste of the sandwich.
It is that simple. Cooking, as I said at the beginning of the post, is a form of art. The artist expresses her/himself through the simple act of respecting the ingredients.
Understanding how different ingredients affect each other, understanding how to balance tastes by playing with contrasts, and incorporating different textures into the dish, will all amplify the mundane and the everyday. One does not have to buy expensive ingredients to cook well. It is often the case that simple ingredients make the best dishes!
This dish incorporates all of the above-mentioned ideas. The crispy toast and the crunchy peppers contrast with the chewy biltong and soft avo-feta spread. The salty butter, salty feta, and savoury biltong contrast well with the sweet peppers and tangy-lemony-rich avocado.
Cooking is also personal, so obviously the goal is to experiment with all of these ideas and see what works best for your palate. Everyone experiences these things differently.
In any case, I hope that you will give this recipe a try! Or that it inspires you to creatively think about your own recipes. The tartine is the playground of any creative chef.
Experiment with contrasting flavours.
Experiment with contrasting textures.
Experiment, experiment, and again, experiment!
The cooking world offers so many variations of the same things. Do not get stuck on a single recipe you saw on Instagram, do not get stuck on tradition and habit, but use these things as springboards from which to elevate your cooking. Testing boundaries is the way to figure out new flavour combinations. Breaking away from tradition is the way new recipes are written. But it is not a discarding of tradition or boundaries, as these are important guides, goalposts, or road signs to show us if we are on track, on the right way, or in the correct place. Have fun with it.
I hope that your cooking experiments go well. Stay safe.
All of the writings in this post are my own, unless stated otherwise and/or hyperlinked. The photographs used are also my own, taken with my iPhone.