Garden Caprese Toast

We’re all familiar with the concept of Caprese Salad, but moving that salad onto a slice of toast and adding a few humble ingredients changes the entire plate.

Again, we’re putting the emphasis on fresh, local, seasonal ingredients in this dish. Our Garden Caprese Toast is a great appetizer or snack that really tastes like summer. One of my favorite things to do with this is to use it as an appetizer before serving a nice juicy steak. It’s a huge hit, looks great, and will really impress your guests. It’s also fairly easy to prepare this in larger numbers, which makes them perfect for entertaining.

What you’ll need:

French Sourdough Bread (we got ours from Empire Baking Co.)

One tomato (either Roma or heirloom)

Sliced Havarti cheese

One avocado

Fresh Rosemary

Fresh Oregano

Butter

Microgreens

Salt & Pepper

First, preheat your oven to 500 ̊. Line a baking sheet with foil. Cut two slices off your loaf of bread. If you’re having this for lunch, try to cut on a bias to get a bigger slice; if this is the appetizer, a normal slice will work (to keep people from filling up on it!). Slice several pieces off your tomato, as well as the avocado (of course, no pit or skin). Lay the bread on the pan and spread butter over the bread. Now very finely chop your rosemary and oregano and spread the herbs over the butter bread. Once the oven is preheated, pop ‘em in. Keep a close eye on them because they will toast fast at that temperature! Once toasted, quickly remove from the oven and slap some Havarti on top of the bread. If desired, you can stick them back in the oven for a few seconds to melt the cheese a bit more.

Now that the toast is toast… Lay the tomato and avocado slices on top of the cheese, alternating between the two. I personally like to cut the tomato slices in half. Next, sprinkle some salt and pepper to taste. Lastly, as a super nutritious garnish, sprinkle some microgreens over top of everything!

Some variants: Havarti is my favorite sandwich cheese, but one could be more “Caprese” and use fresh mozzarella, cheese curds, or any other type of cheese! The possibilities are virtually endless. Another thing I like to do is use truffle salt as opposed to table or sea salt; this pairs very nicely with the truffle cheddar from Brazos Valley Cheese.