I tasted a dish this week I’ve never had before: bruschetta topped with prosciutto and raisin confit. While bruschetta has always been a favorite of mine, I’ve never had the grilled (or toasted) bread prepared this way. The confit’s sweetness paired nicely with the proscuitto’s saltiness.
I tasted the bruschetta during our annual Harvest Retreat, a two-day event where we brought more than 100 chefs, culinary pros and others on a tour of our olive ranch in Artois, in northern California. It’s one of three ranches we operate.
We walked our guests through our olive mill and showed them our nearby olive orchard.
The gathering comes in the midst of harvest season, when our mill operators are busy crushing freshly picked olives into extra virgin olive oil. One person jokingly suggested we bottle the fresh olive aroma wafting through the mill.
Jeff Anderson, chef director of culinary innovation at Safeway Inc., took us through a demonstration of how the bruschetta and raisin confit are prepared.
“The confit is really a style of cooking down the fruit you use,” Anderson told the guests crowded around the demonstration table.
To make the confit, sauté shallots in extra virgin olive oil until caramelized. Next, deglaze the shallots with red wine, orange juice and balsamic vinegar until the liquid is reduced by half. Add rosemary and raisins, cooking the raisins until they’re soft and the liquid thickens.
In addition to the confit and the prosciutto, the bruschetta gets topped with thinly shaved white or sweet Walla Walla onion and arugula. Anderson then brought the ingredients together with a drizzle of our Arbequina EVOO.
“This recipe really focuses on the Arbequina,” he said. “It brings a balanced flavor to the bruschetta.”
Anderson noted you can mix and match the ingredients to create your own flavor combination.
Bruschetta (the Italians pronounce it brew SKETTA) is a very timely dish this time of year.
According to Alan Davidson’s tome The Penguin Companion to Food (Penguin Books, 2002), bruschetta is a Tuscan dish “designed to show off the new season’s oil at the time of the olive harvest” – an oil called Olio Nuovo. We plan to begin shipping our Olio Nuovo next month.
Bon appétit,
Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch
