Finding tasty ways to use up leftover ingredients is one of the recurring themes of this blog. This week, it’s a container of blue cheese crumbles. This Blue Cheese, Pear, and Honey Tartine is so good, it’s better than the dish we originally bought the blue cheese for! It’s loaded with ooey gooey flavor, makes an impressive lunch when paired with a small, simple, green salad and a chinotto, and could be scaled up into show-stopping party food easily.

Ingredients for 4 reasonable servings:
(or 2 excessive servings, or 12 three-bite hors d’oeuvres)

1 loaf (13-oz.) of ciabatta
1-2 Tbs butter, softened
1 Bosc pear
¼ cup cherry paste (see note)
8 slices crispy bacon
2-3 oz. blue cheese, or a cheese mixture (see note)
1-2 Tbs honey

How To Do It:

1. Slice the bread in half horizontally. Reserve one of the halves for another use. Butter the cut side of the remaining half. Lightly toast it on a baking sheet in the broiler, checking it every minute or two.
2. Spread the toasted bread with cherry paste. Distribute the bacon across the whole thing.
3. Slice the pear thinly. Use a paring knife to remove whatever parts of the core turn up in your slices. Lay the slices over the bacon. Sprinkle the cheese over the pear slices, taking care to distribute it evenly, across the entire surface.
4. Return the tartine to the broiler until the cheese has melted and is beginning to brown.
5. Drizzle with honey, cut into quarters, and serve immediately.

Notes:

1. I don’t see any need to peel the pear, but of course you could. The pear needs to be ripe and soft to work in this recipe. An apple would make a nice substitute, if it were sliced paper-thin.
2. I made the cherry paste by grinding dried cherries and cooking them down with kirschwasser. It’s more tart than sweet. A great substitute would be commercially prepared fig spread – preferably some thing naturally sweet, but not sugary. A jam or preserve might be too sweet, but worth a try. Or go another direction, perhaps with a chutney.
3. I decided to use the microwave to cook the bacon, out of curiosity. You have to take surprising care not to overcook it. All the bacon fat winds up in the paper towels, which is probably a bonus for many people, but not for someone who loves to cook with bacon fat. I found that five minutes was just about right for eight slices. Still, though, I’m sold on cooking it in the oven.
4. I love blue cheese, but a little goes a long way with me, so I used a cheese mixture: 1 oz. blue, 1 oz. Ubriaco del Piave (an Italian cow’s milk cheese), and 1½ oz. double cream gouda. I was tempted to use more than 3 oz. of cheese, but I’m glad I didn’t – it was perfect. The blue cheese shone clearly through.
5. All sorts of bread would work with this tartine: sourdough immediately comes to mind. If you wind up using a loaf whose shape wouldn’t lend itself to the manner in which I’ve used the ciabatta, it’d be best if it were unsliced, so that you could cut nice, thick slices by hand. In that case, Step 1 would involve buttering and toasting both sides of the bread in a frying pan. (In fact, this will produce a more traditional-looking tartine.)
6. Chopped nuts – such as hazelnuts or walnuts – make a nice garnish, sprinkled on top the cheese before broiling. Don’t toast them; the broiler will do it.
7. Because the top of the ciabatta is domed, it needs a bit of extra thought. You might slice off part of the dome, in order to make this half of the ciabatta more like the bottom half. And in that case, you might want to grill both sides of this ciabatta half in the first step of the recipe. Otherwise, you may need to adjust your broiler, since the domed half will leave the toppings significantly closer to the flame. You’ll also want to take care when creating slices, because, depending on the curvature of the dome, some of them might wind up looking more like wedges than slices.

Starting with a 13-oz. ciabatta loaf will leave you with 3″ x 5″ quarters. If you sliced each quarter into thirds, you’d have 12 snack-size three-bites that you could easily eat by hand, served on cocktail napkins. It would be a trivial matter to double this recipe, and make a second tartine with the other half of the ciabatta. They’ll both fit easily onto the same baking sheet. You could omit the cherry paste, bacon, and/or the pears and wind up a with a nonetheless delicious, cheese-focused tartine. Best served fresh. Microwaves well enough to make a nice little breakfast, though. Might be a good candidate for the next-day pizza treatment.

If you’re like me, you probably recognize “tartine” as what they used to call you before you grew up into a full-fledged trollop. And “honey tartine,” you’d be thinking, “is one hell of a name for a drag queen!” As would be Blue Cheese, if it were spelled Bleu Cheez – but, oddly, neither of them appears on the canonical list of drag queen names. Thank God you’re not like me; in that case, a tartine is a French, open-faced, grilled “sandwich” – if you can use that term this close to the word “French” – with a fancy topping.

Blue Cheese, Pear, and Honey Tartine

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! This content was not solicited by anyone, nor was it written in exchange for anything. In preparing this post, I relied heavily on The Guardian.

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