Tomato~Fontina Torte with Rosemary Crust

It's my favorite time of the year. Not just summer, with all the tasty berries and veggies, but specifically it's tomato & peach season. I wanted to make a tomato tart with some of our tomato bounty, but was a little bored with our usual go to tomato tarts. Happily, the recent issue of Food Network Magazine had some tasty sounding tomato tart ideas. Like this one: Tomato~Fontina Torte with Rosemary Crust.

This tart (torte) is a little time consuming, but it's worth it. It's not difficult. SP whipped up the crust Sunday morning whole I was showering. At last - a chance to use some of our fresh rosemary, which is finally large enough to use. So nice after last year's complete rosemary growing failure and this year's slower than molasses rosemary growing.

Lots & lots of tomatoes! On the left are our tomatoes and CSA tomatoes. The right are the farmers market heirloom tomatoes. Do you have to use heirloom tomatoes as the recipe states? I say no. Use whatever kind you want. Note: I sliced and salted way more than we ended up using, so we've been eating the leftover slices on the side, on sandwiches, for quick snacks.

The next part? Super easy: layering.

Chilled crust

Sprinkle panko on crust, add first layer of tomatoes

Next, the capicola, we used sweet, not spicy

Cheese layer! Fontina & Parmesan (we didn't use pecorino romano)

Keep layering tomatoes and capicola and cheese, finishing with tomatoes on top

The final layer - a sprinkle of Parmesan

Out of the oven & cooling

This smelled so good. It was tough to wait an hour to cut into it, but fortunately, we had a lot of clean up to occupy us. Like with lasagna, structural integrity is important, so you really do need to wait that hour for it to set.

It was delicious. Fontina is kind of a mild cheese (to me) but it melts oh so smooth. Fresh tomatoes? So juicy and flavorful (but not so juicy as to make the tart a watery mess). The crust? It looked and acted like a shortbread when SP made it, but it tasted like a pie crust. Very nice rosemary flavor.

Even though you can see lots of flecks of rosemary in the crust, I think next time we would add a bit more to the crust and sprinkle some additional herbs in with the layers.

You could use regular ham, or rosemary ham, or spicy capicola. Maybe tiny cubed/sliced chicken. Salami slices. I think next time we might try it with a different cheese. The Fontina is oh so delicious, but with that deliciousness comes a price - more than we expected! We might try a cheaper fontina-like cheese, like fontinella, or maybe mozzarella, or maybe provolone.

But for sure, we'll be making this again.

Recipe here.