The better way to make tomato toast

The mind keeps a strange little pantry of its own.

It shelves a photograph you paused over, a dish you ate three summers ago, a flavor combination you praised enthusiastically in public and then apparently continued discussing with yourself in private. Later, it sends an idea forward as though it has arrived whole.

Mine was miso-butter tomato toast.

A friend had recently posted photographs from Barcelona, including several enviable angles of pan con tomate. In one, it sat on a tiny plate beside a chilled vermouth cocktail garnished with a pearl onion on a spear. In another, it occupied an outdoor café table next to an exceptionally good pair of cat-eye sunglasses. I wanted the toast, the cocktail, the sunglasses and, presumably, whatever version of myself knew how to arrange all three so casually.

I had also recently waxed poetic about compound butter during a live discussion on summer entertaining. And after several weeks of 90-degree days, I had become devoted to grating tomatoes, an activity especially suited to weather in which chewing can seem like an unreasonable demand.

The name arrived before the instructions did. I knew it would involve sourdough. I knew the bread would be toasted in the oven, where its entire surface could become evenly crisp rather than merely acquire a few handsome skillet stripes. I knew I wanted unsalted butter and mild white miso. And I knew the finished thing would require some crunch.

It had, in other words, the certainty of a craving and the vagueness of a dream.

Toast is forgiving of this kind of thinking. It is the food of pantry rummagers and refrigerator foragers, and it exists on a curious emotional spectrum. One person says, with defeat, “All I managed today was beans on toast.” Another announces, with delight, “I made these incredible marinated white beans and put them on toast.” I am firmly in the latter camp. Toast is what happens when three unrelated things in the refrigerator agree to become lunch.

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This particular toast only looked improvised. Beneath its casual, slightly rumpled appearance was a specific bit of flavor logic: salt, fat, sweetness, acidity, glutamates upon glutamates.

There is a quiet kitchen principle I return to often: What wants to hold hands?

Spend enough time cooking — or leafing through cookbooks in bed — and you notice certain ingredients keep reaching for one another. Tomato already knows butter from ghee-rich curries, grilled cheese dipped in tomato soup and Marcella Hazan’s famously spare sauce. Miso and butter are just as comfortable together, whether in mashed potatoes or chocolate-chip cookies. The combination needed little persuasion. I only had to decide what shape it would take.

I considered whipping the miso into cold butter, making a compound butter to scrape over oven-hot sourdough before adding tomato slices and crystalline hunks of salt. But I wanted the miso butter to seep into the bread, not merely sit on top of it. I considered basting the tomatoes in butter and stewing them down with miso until soft and glossy. That version sounds wonderful, but it belongs to the first day the temperature slips below 70 degrees.

This was summer. The tomato needed to remain itself.

I melted the butter and miso together until fragrant and faintly nutty, then brushed it over sourdough and baked the slices until deeply golden. I grated a ripe tomato into a bowl, an operation I find disproportionately satisfying. When the skin has collapsed into your palm like a deflated balloon, you lift the box grater and discover an almost implausible amount of ruby pulp underneath it. Apparently, when it comes to shreds and zest, I possess the object permanence of a baby. Every time, the reveal delights me.

I seasoned the tomato with salt and a little garlic powder, which supplied savory warmth without the acridity fresh garlic can bring. I spooned it over the hot toast and finished it with scallions, sesame seeds, black pepper and olive oil.

I had my notebook open beside me, ready to catalogue the toast’s faults. Recipe development has trained me to distrust a dish that works on the first try; it is like meeting someone wonderful on a first date and spending the evening scanning for red flags. I have to be missing something, right?

Perhaps it needed acid. White balsamic, maybe, or a splash of the regular kind. Then I tasted it.

I took another bite before picking up my pen.

“This is a good toast,” I wrote.

Another bite.

“I’m glad I didn’t add vinegar.”