I sat gently at an outdoor table in the crowded Café Plaça in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, eating a delicacy. My privilege was immense. It was the canonical dish of the region, what it’s famous for, and this was my first time to try it. Little-seen outside Spain, the best versions so hotly debated as to put enthusiasts into competing camps. In the local Catalan, it’s called “pan amb oli” (or panamboli), or “pan con tomate” in Spanish. It is bread rubbed with tomatoes and drizzled with olive oil.
Perhaps you were expecting something more exciting for a famous, canonical, and beloved dish, such as paella or bouillabaisse?
Mallorca (or Majorca, take your pick) is an island off the coast of Spain, in the Mediterranean. It’s part of the Balearic Islands, which includes the more famous party island of Ibiza. Mallorca is wildly popular as well, mostly with Europeans, mostly with the Brits and the Germans. With North Americans like me, not as much. Most of my friends had never heard of it. It’s got all the paellas and tapas and pintxos of the “mainland” (as the Mallorcans call the rest of Spain). But pan amb oli has their heart.
Seemingly an easy dish, without fuss. A few debates exist, as to whether it’s best to add the oil to the bread first and then rub with tomato, as the Mallorcans do, (pan amb oli means ‘bread with oil’, after all), or do the tomatoes first and then the oil, as is done with what’s called pa amb tomàquet (bread with tomatoes) in Catalonia. Should one toast the bread beforehand, or rub with garlic? How about a drizzle of salt? Dammit, these things matter.
People post recipes on the internet as if the phrase “bread rubbed with tomatoes and drizzled with oil” isn’t already enough of a recipe in itself and all the instructions you’ll ever need.
Here it is, the local favorite, here topped with cheese
The BBC chef Rick Stein (I’m a fan) has a segment about pan amb oli in his series “Rick Stein’s Mediterranean Escapes“. While filming his segment on Mallorca, he’s sitting down with Tomás Graves, the son of the famous British poet Robert Graves who lived on the island. Tomás absolutely considered pan amb oli to be the heart and soul of the island’s cuisine, so much that his rock band is named Pan Amb Oli and he later wrote a book entitled “Bread & Oil: Majorcan Culture’s Last Stand“.
There on camera, Rick enjoys some pan amb oli served by Tomás and raves about how “It’s the simple things that are hardest to get right.”
And yet. I’m torn here. I’m a fan of simple food done really well, but this is quite seriously way simple. It’s like saying that oatmeal with raisins is your most beloved local dish. Or rice sprinkled with peanuts. Broccoli with feta cheese cubes. Some things are so simple it’s questionable whether they are really a dish.
Simple foods can be lovely, and certainly gourmet. Pasta with tomato sauce. Cold Asian noodles with sesame. Soba noodles with a dipping sauce. Sushi. Fried potatoes. Fried rice. Hard-boiled eggs with mayonnaise. Omelets. Middle Eastern za’atar flatbreads. Yet while these things are simple, they require serious skill to make them taste really good, and they all require actual cooking and preparation skills instead of putting a few common ingredients together.
Bread with tomato/oil is a popular snack throughout Spain, and for good reasons. Same reason people like bread with peanut butter. Easy to make and awfully cheap. Tapas restaurant throughout North America offer pan con tomate on their menus, usually for about six or seven U.S. dollars. The best-known tapas restaurant in Washington D.C., where I live, offers “Pan de cristal con tomate” which is, and I quote their menu, “Toasted slices of uniquely crispy and ethereal bread brushed with fresh tomato.” Ten dollars. No way will I ever pay ten dollars for that.
Some restaurants bring you bread for free, I hear. Perhaps with mere butter, perhaps with other spreads such as tapenade. Sometimes it’s damn nice bread, with herbs and such. Sometimes with olive oil, though you have to drizzle it yourself, a skill I possess. They may charge you a bit for bread in places like Italy, but generally, no. But rub that stuff with tomato, and suddenly it’s a set dish, costing more than a sandwich.
Breakfast one morning, with squid ink tortilla (potato and egg cake). And guess what came on the side?
Bread rubbed with tomato. You may have thought this would be a post praising simple food, an ode, but no, I’m not that conventional. I have long thought that European food, as wonderful as it is, is sometimes cheating. I have seen French restaurants serve an ice cream bar, still in its paper wrapping, on a plate as dessert, and Spanish desserts consisting only of a few peach halves in heavy syrup, taken right out of a can. Appetizers of white asparagus, taken out of a jar and simply laid on a plate. Nothing bad, but certainly not special and not worth its price.
There in the Café Plaça in Mallorca on my first day on the island, I ordered pan amb oli with Mahonés cheese, costing me €5,90. I told myself I was paying for the excellent cheese, not so much the bread. Pan amb oli often comes with toppings, usually cheese or ham. Later in the week, I ordered it at another place covered with bacalao, salt cod slices. It came covered with rocket at well, and it was a fine snack.
I won’t score points with the Spanish by knocking a beloved dish, but some food needs to be yours before you realize how special it is. The author Tomás Graves above says he learned everything he knows about pan amb oli from a lifetime of eating it. I don’t have that.
Pan amb oli topped with rocket and bacalao
I recently posted the photo above to this blog’s Instagram account [here’s the link. And follow me, willya?] and a user named Rosie commented, “Pamboli is my favourite food. Simple, but what my majorcan grandma would make me for dinner, and that makes it my fav.” No arguing with that, and much understanding there. Your grandma used to make it, then it’s good. This is home food.
A few nights ago, a craving for a midnight snack made me think of it. I grabbed some rye bread, cut a tomato (from a can, sorry. It’s November) in half and rubbed it all over the bread slices, then toasted them a bit and added plenty of olive oil and just a bit of grated cheese.
Rather satisfying. Rubbing the tomato into the bread felt surprisingly enjoyable. A few days later, I tried it for breakfast, using part of a baguette this time. Amazing how rubbing in a tomato gives you a good feel for the bread. You think about its texture and composition, what it can handle and how much.
That’s when the obvious hit me: Pan amb oli is home food, not restaurant food. Perhaps as a snack in a café, with cheese or ham or bacalao on top, much like a simple and casual sandwich. But it works best as home food, as breakfast or a snack or even a light dinner with a salad. It’s what people would make for their grandkids as a snack. There’s little point to seeking it out and ordering it, but much to enjoy by making it.
I mentioned other examples of simple food above, and mostly they are not things I eat in a restaurant. Sushi, yes, because I don’t keep ultra-fresh raw fish around much, but I would never order spaghetti with just tomato sauce in a restaurant. I make it fantastic at home anyway. Fried potatoes, yes, as I don’t have a deep-fryer at home, but fried rice, no. Again, you can make it better at home, or hopefully you have an Asian grandmother to make it for you, with love.
Anywhere you travel, you’ll of course want to try the food. That’s a given, as it’s part of the reason we travel anyway. Some dishes, like paella, I don’t make very well at home. That’s food to travel for. The really simple food is the stuff you learn abroad but can bring home, like our tomato bread. I have a feeling this dish, if one can truly call it a dish, will be a habit for me. A simple one.
How to make pan amb oli: take some bread and a cut tomato. Rub the cut side of the bread with the cut side of the tomato and add a good amount of olive oil.
Right, then, there are a few nuances. Almost any bread would do, but it’s better for it to have some texture, not too soft. Wonder Bread will not do. Make sure you really push down with the tomato, getting pulp and seeds into the bread. It’s not just brushing some tomato sauce on it. The bread has to suffer. Some people put so much tomato in that the bread loses much of its structure.
Go for both quality and quantity of olive oil. It’s a large part of the taste, so don’t use cheap oil. Don’t just sprinkle, dribble, or drizzle a bit of the stuff; give the bread a decent soaking. Olive oil is good for you. I remember a time at breakfast in Cordoba, Spain, watching a Spanish girl eat a bun. She ripped it in half and grabbed a squeeze bottle of honey, pouring it into the bun. More and more, until the bun was nearly saturated with it, and then I realized to my shock that it wasn’t honey, as I had somehow and foolishly assumed. It was olive oil. The bun was soaked in it, and that was her breakfast.
Pan amb oli can be topped with most anything. If no toppings, consider sprinkling just a bit of salt on top, as it needs that taste. Pepper is good as well, as is really anything.
