Dinner · 5 min · 2 plates
Ricotta tomato plate
Salt, oil, ripe tomato. That's the recipe.
The sheet · 2 plates · 5 min
easyWhy tonight. Salt, oil, ripe tomato. That's the recipe.
What it needs
Nothing confirmed on your shelf yet — this list is the whole ask.
- ricotta
- tomato
- olive oil
- basil
Good if you have them, fine if you do not: bread.
Method
- Beat the ricotta with salt until it turns from grainy to smooth. Thirty seconds and it is a different ingredient.
- Spread it thick on the plate and lay the tomatoes on top, so the cheese takes the juice rather than the bread.
- Salt the tomatoes on the board first, always.
- Oil over everything, basil torn by hand, bread on the side rather than underneath so it stays crisp.
An educational plan from a curated corpus. Not a nutrition, allergen, or doneness guarantee.
Cook or pour it, then edit the shelf if you emptied a bottle or used the last of something.
Why each of these is on the list
What the ingredients are actually doing
- ricotta
- Mild, milky and wet. Drain it if it is going into anything baked, season it hard if it is going on anything — unsalted ricotta tastes like nothing, which is why so many people think they dislike it.
- tomato
- Sweet, sour and savory at once, which is why it holds up so many dishes with no meat in them.
- olive oil
- Two ingredients sharing a name.
- basil
- Perfume rather than flavor, and heat destroys it.
Missing one of them? The substitutions are written against those jobs rather than against a chart, so they say what each replacement costs this dish in particular.
Cooks from the same box
If you bought for this, you can already make these
Shares tomato, basil, olive oil
Caprese
Only worth making in tomato season. Salt the slices on the board first, tear the mozzarella rather than slicing it, and the oil goes on last.
Shares tomato, basil, olive oil
Caprese pita
Salt the tomato, drain the mozzarella, and oil the inside of the pocket so the juice does not go straight through the bread.
Shares tomato, basil, olive oil
Tomato mozzarella pasta
Drain the mozzarella and tear it, or it thins the sauce to pink milk. It should end up in strings and pockets, never melted through.
Shares tomato, olive oil, basil
Pappa al pomodoro
Tuscan bread-and-tomato porridge. Stale bread, more oil than you think, basil. It should be a spoon food, not a soup with croutons.
Next
Cook it, then tell the shelf what you used.
The ranking is only as honest as the shelf behind it. Empty the cream, and everything that leaned on cream should stop being offered.