The Best Way To Prep Tomatoes For Flavor-Packed Bruschetta

Bruschetta is the perfect summer appetizer — simple, yet bursting with bright flavors. It's the kind of dish that begs to be shared amongst friends and family on a warm, sunny day. It's also easy to prepare, so you can please a crowd without too much stress. There's just one issue with bruschetta. Tomatoes are supposed to anchor the entire flavor profile, and a lot of tomatoes are bland. Even if you get lucky and find a perfect, juicy summer heirloom, there are still ways to boost the flavor of tomatoes, making the mediocre ones good, and good ones great.

You don't need to do anything complex. In fact, you should keep it simple when it comes to bruschetta. The one thing you should be doing to maximize flavor is salting your tomatoes. As soon as you've diced them up, sprinkle them with salt and put them in a colander or sieve to drain any excess liquid that could make your bruschetta soggy, and leave them there for at least 15 minutes (you could go as long as two hours if you want to prep in advance).

You might think that adding salt would just make the bruschetta taste salty, but that's not the case at all. It will actually make it much more tomato-y. This isn't just a crucial step for bruschetta either. You should be doing this any time you use fresh tomatoes in the kitchen. It will take the flavor to new levels, and it's all thanks to some pretty cool kitchen chemistry.

Salt is, simply put, the most important ingredient in cooking. It does so much more than make things salty, and that's because salt has chemical properties that can transform almost any other ingredient. When you sprinkle salt on sliced or diced tomatoes, it draws out the water trapped within the cells of the tomato's flesh via the process of osmosis. This makes the flavor of the tomato less watered down, or in other words, more concentrated.

It's best to use kosher salt for this task. It's arguably the best salt to stock in your pantry because it is all-purpose and it has a milder flavor than table salt, which could make your tomatoes taste too salty. After you salt your tomatoes, it's important to put them in a strainer to drain, otherwise all that liquid that's being pulled out of the fruit will seep right into the bread of your bruschetta (it's also important to use crusty bread for bruschetta). You should strain it over a bowl to collect the runoff, because even though it is mostly water, it still has some flavorful compounds in it, and makes a nice addition to salad dressings and sauces.