Wine of the Month Club | How to Make Crostini

Hey, welcome to the Wine of the Month Club’s first kitchen demonstration of one of the recipes that we’re featuring in the email special. We’re featuring two of our products, the Vista Alba Extra Virgin Olive Oil from Argentina and our Melina’s Balsamic Vinegar from Modena. But I want to make these quick Bruschettas, Auntie Sander’s famous bruschetta. And it does really well in all our parties that we have. Everybody loves it. It’s very simple to make. We’ll get started right away and make some.

So what you want to do is you want to start with your favorite sort of ciabatta bread and cut it really thin, about a quarter an inch. Probably want to spray some palm over your pan first so that it doesn’t stick with [inaudible 0:32] we’ll put some parmesan cheese and this will probably stick to the pan. So we take it, cut a quarter an inch. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. You can use convection, make a little shorter, takes about 15-20 minutes to bakes this. And you want it to be kind of crunchy. I like my next to be crunchy and you’ll see that in a second.

So first we’re going to take our olive oil. Just put it in a dish, just like this. It’s gorgeous. Olive oil has wonderful fresh olives down. Just dab it on there with our thing. We’ll just do a couple of these so you see it happening live here. Now this olive oil is state grown in Argentina. This is from the Vista Alba. We featured actually a couple of their wines in the Wine of the Month Club. It is grown on their property. Our vinegar is from Modena. This is Melina’s. And I tasted dozens of vinegars to find this one. And I think once you taste this, you’ll realize that institutional vinegars just aren’t as good a quality as this one is. It’s important because is a misnomer in the world. Balsamic vinegar is not wine vinegar like the red wine vinegar you see at the markets. It is actually trebbiano grape juice. It’s a grape from Tuscany and it’s reduced. And the reason it’s slightly expensive is because the wine or the reduction ratio is like 10 times once they start with the grape juice, they put it in the barello and it starts to reduce itself, evaporate. It actually goes down about ten times of its original volume. So it is a little on the expensive side, but it’s so much different and so much better than institutional balsamic vinegars which is basically grape juice mixed with red wine vinegar, and then they add some  caramel coloring.

So we’re going to dab over the olive oil, we’re going to dab some of the balsamic vinegar just like this. Now I like to sort of spice it up a bit. And I put a little rock, this is Peruvian Pink rock salt. But you don’t have to do that I just kind of like jack it up just a bit. We’ll sprinkle it on top. Then we’ll take our parmesan cheese. We’ll sprinkle that right on top of it. It’s ok to get some of the pan. It’s not going to hurt anything as long as you spray it first so it’s non-stick. Then we’re going to take this pan and put it in the oven at 350 degrees just for about 20 minutes. And the magic of Hollywood, here we have our result now. And like I said, I like ours a little toasty. And that’s what it looks like, just put it in a bread pan. Let it cool so that it gets crunchy. That’s the most important part about this thing. And look at this, it’s just so good. Can you hear that? I mean it’s loud, right? Anyway, welcome, enjoy this and don’t chew your mouth full.

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