The Art of Preparing Anchovy Toast: A Guide to Creating the Perfect Italian Dish

When it comes to Italian cooking, there's one dish that stands out as a masterclass in simplicity and flavor: anchovy toast. And for good reason - with just a few high-quality ingredients, you can create a truly unforgettable culinary experience. In this article, we'll delve into the world of anchovy toast, exploring the best practices for preparing the perfect Italian classic.

Choosing the Right Parsley

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One of the most crucial components of anchovy toast is the type of parsley used. Flat-leaf parsley, also known as Italian parsley, is the clear winner when it comes to this dish. Its delicate flavor and texture make it the perfect complement to the salty, umami taste of anchovies. When selecting parsley, look for a fresh bunch with bright green leaves and a slight stem at the bottom - these are all signs that your parsley is of high quality.

Preparing the Parsley

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To prepare your parsley for anchovy toast, simply pull off a small handful and chop it coarsely. Don't worry too much about achieving uniformity - the goal is to add a burst of freshness to each bite. Some cooks prefer to use only the leaves, while others like to include the stems (which can be used in soups or stocks later). For anchovy toast, we recommend using just the leaves for maximum impact.

The Beauty of Anchovies

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Anchovies are a staple ingredient in Italian cooking, and their salty, umami flavor is an essential component of any respectable anchovy toast. Look for high-quality, cured anchovies that have been preserved in olive oil - these will add depth and richness to your dish. When working with anchovies, be sure to use them sparingly - a little goes a long way when it comes to their intense flavor.

Toasting the Bread

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There's nothing quite like the smell of freshly toasted bread wafting from the kitchen. For anchovy toast, we recommend using a rustic Italian bread that can hold its own against the bold flavors of the anchovies and parsley. Simply slice your bread into thick slices, place it under the broiler for a few minutes until golden brown, and voila! You're on your way to creating a truly unforgettable snack.

Finishing Touches

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Once you've toasted your bread and sprinkled your parsley and anchovies atop, it's time to add the final touches. A drizzle of high-quality olive oil can help tie everything together, while a sprinkle of flake sea salt adds a touch of crunch and texture. Some cooks like to use more than one type of salt - we recommend experimenting with different varieties until you find the perfect balance.

Presentation is Everything

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When it comes to anchovy toast, presentation is key. A simple board or platter can elevate this humble dish into a true showstopper. Slice your bread into thick slices and arrange them artfully on your plate, topping each slice with a generous helping of parsley, anchovies, and cheese (if desired). Don't be afraid to get creative - after all, that's what makes Italian cooking so magical!

Tips for the Feast of Seven Fishes

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For those who celebrate the Feast of Seven Fishes (which typically falls on Christmas Eve), anchovy toast is an absolute must-have. To make this dish shine, try pairing it with a glass of Prosecco or another crisp white wine. The acidity and bubbles will help cut through the richness of the anchovies and butter, creating a truly unforgettable combination.

The Ultimate Anchovy Toast Experience

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So how do you know when you've created the perfect anchovy toast? It's all about balance - too little parsley or anchovies, and the dish falls flat. Too much, and it becomes overwhelming. But when everything comes together in harmony, that's when the magic happens. Take a bite of your perfectly toasted bread, and let the flavors transport you to the sun-kissed Mediterranean coast. That's what anchovy toast is all about - pure, unadulterated joy.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eneveryone I'm Antonia lefaso welcome to my home so excited to be doing this cook along with you for the Feast of Seven Fishes we're going to do an anchovy toast today with a little bit of olive oil butter flake sea salt Italian Anchovies and parsley this is a great dish for the Feast of Seven Fishes which is a meal primarily made of a bounty of seafood for Christmas Eve I grew up in Long Island New York and we did dishes like this every single year Okay so couple of housekeeping tips that we need to go over let's preheat the oven to a medium high broil you want to make sure that you have both of your wire racks in there at the high top level and also at the medium level we will adjust the toast from the top to the bottom so that it gets nice and brown and evenly browned um and you want to make sure that you have five tablespoons of unsalted high quality grass-fed butter at room temperature all right we are ready to start cooking we'll do a little stretch we'll do a little like roll out the shoulders this is a great recipe I love Anchovies and I specifically love anchovies on crispy buttery Olive oily toasted bread with a ton of salt and garlic and parsley super easy dish but this is about sort of high quality ingredients so we've got a beautiful grass-fed butter unsalted we've got great olive oil we have a flake sea salt that we're going to use and then we have incredible imported Italian anchovies and if anyone has ever spent any time on the Amalfi Coast or anywhere in Italy you will know that the anchovies over there are so different than what we have in the states so please if you can Splurge this time of year do it with an imported anchovy from Italy these products are available online specialty Grocers as well also have these kinds of items okay so let's start with our baguette yes baguettes are French this is an Italian Dish that's okay no one's going to get upset um I like to use I get because it's a little more firm and put together chabata is also another opportunity but for some reason I don't always go for the chabata because the beautiful thing about chabata it's got a lot of ton of holes and I really want this bread to be a little less air rated so I'm going to take the bread I'm going to cut it in half and then we're going to cut it in half again and then long ways okay so just write down the center I want to make sure that my hand is on top I'm using a serrated knife and I'm coming through around and around to have the Bread open Perfectly and you can see what I'm talking about it's a concentrated bread right there are a little bit of ation holes there that are great but this is bread that can really hold up to a ton of fat that olive oil and butter and it can also hold up um to kind of toasting and cooking think about essentially we're making a garlic bread with anchovies um so we've got the baguette trimmed and cut in half we're just going to place it on top of this sheet rack we already have the broiler ready to go it's at a medium to high and then of course we have both of those baking sheets inside of the oven ready to go at the top tier to get nice and brown and the bottom tier so that it gets perfectly golden brown I'm going to take a clove of garlic um and just kind of I just need one clove of garlic so I just kind of pop on the top right hit it very very gently with sort of the base and the my hand and the cloves just kind of open up okay so I only need one clove of garlic here because we're just going to use this as an opportunity to rub the bread with garlic so the original garlic bread is called funa and funa is basically just bread that's been toasted and then rubbed with garlic so we just want to give it like a little bit of garlic Essence if you will so when I cut open the garlic you can see this piece that's open so the skin has been pierced because we don't want the primary flavor to be garlic we want the primary flavor to be fat and anchovies butter and anchovies olive oil and anchovies but the garlic is just really to sort of give that underlining tone when you're like oo it tastes like something there's just a little bit of garlic that's rubbed on here um so we just go ahead top to bottom side to side when you're rubbing your bread with garlic you don't want to do it just in the center right because that Center bite only has garlic you want to go Edge Edge Edge Center Center Center and you want to do it a couple times smell of the garlic is on so great on the bread but again this is just to kind of rub the essence of that garlic the oil of that garlic on this raw bread and then we're going to start with the fat okay so get rid of that we don't need any more of this garlic we're going to start with just a little bit of olive oil and by a little bit of olive oil I mean a lot lot we're just going to generously drizzle olive oil over the top of the bread now why am I using butter and olive oil okay both are flavored right so the olive oil is going to give more flavor to the fat whereas the butter is just going to give this Rich creaminess okay also really kind of allows for a richer Browning so butter tends to Brown very very quickly olive oil has it take a little bit more time so it kind of makes the bread cook a little bit better as the butter allows for it to Brown okay so the bread has been cut olive oil has been drizzled there's a great amount of garlic that's just been rubbed over the top now we're going to do five tablespoons of butter we're just going to spread over the top of the bread okay just like so right over the top so olive oil and butter olive oil butter and garlic right over the top again super simple recipe but really it's about high quality ingredients made in a super special way okay so butter butter from Base to Base side to side we don't want one area that is not covered in butter great here we go done and done so we've got all that butter all that garlic you know this is splurging when you put that much butter and that much garlic just on some toast okay we're going to remove the top of anchovies and we're going to generously Place anchovies throughout the area so I like to kind of not mess with the anchovies too much in here we're going to pull them out let's see so oh beautiful look how beautifully pink and cured they are in olive oil we're going to just lay them out and we're going to cut them halfway on a bias and then just arrange them perfectly on top of that toast right so it's essentially eight pieces per side we're have a good amount of anchovies here so so so good it takes so much for me not to just pop one of these like right into my mouth okay so we're going to start to layer the anchovies we're going to lay the anchovies right onto this buttered olive oil bread so we're just cutting the anchovie on a bias and by a bias I just mean I have the entire filet and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to slice it with my knife on an angle right so it's not a blunt end there's kind of like a a a little rectangular shape at the end and then I just just want the anchovie to really be sort of every inch in Between the Bread so inch between each layer okay we don't want it stacked with anchovies anchovies are very aggressive in flavor they have high salinity um and they just have that beautiful oily type of fish flavor that we love but can be very very aggressive so I always say a little bit of anchovy goes along long way so don't feel like you have to really overcrowd the bread with anchovies now if you are an anchovy fanatic and your entire family is an anchovy fanatic please feel free to put as much anchovie on here as you'd like but I'm going to go with an inch in between all and we just want to kind of layer them I mean it looks so simple and so easy and this is also something that you can do ahead of time right so we're looking for the Feast of Seven Fishes which is Christmas Eve a lot of cooking to be done right lot of lot lot of prep to be done so a day in advance a lot of stuff can be done you can cut your anchovies ahead of time you can cut your bread ahead of time but then rewrap it so that it doesn't go uh bad or get stale and so you can have all this ready to go but then I would maybe make them the morning of and you can leave them like this olive oil buttered and then just kind of left on a sheet tray wrapped and right before you're getting ready to serve pull it out and put it into the broiler and toast it's also one of those dishes that after the bread is toasted and beautifully crusted you know and even with the parsley on it it's a dish that can sit for a long period of time on a table if you have a ton of people over there's like a buffet lined up this anchovy toast is not going to die it's going to live on the table for a long time let me wash my hands so essentially you can make this early morning of Christmas Eve wrap it and hold it and get it ready just to pop into the broiler right before you guys are going to get ready to eat or serve look how beautiful that looks it's all the olive oil the butter the garlic and all those anchovies lined up like perfect little anchovy soldiers I'm going to pop it into the oven I'm going to put it medium high right we've got it medium high and we're just going to let these toes and I always like to say the broiler is a dangerous dangerous tool in the kitchen not because it's unsafe but because we always tend to forget what's in the broiler it happens all the time how many bagels have you burned how many pieces of toast have you burned garlic bread oh my goodness all day so I always feel like there should be a timer on even if you know that you're going to you know you're like I'm not going to forget I'm not going to forget don't worry I'm not going to forget everyone always forgets your kids come in your husband's talking you someone's talking to you you get a phone call before you know it you completely forget that you've got something in the broiler so when I'm teaching someone how to cook I like to talk about equipment and ingredients in theory right so everyone should really pay attention to how their ovens behave right some broilers are so so so strong others maybe if it's an older oven you know are like The Little Engine That Could so you may need to really put the you know if it's a broiler that's having a little bit of a hard time really holding its heat maybe the toast is right up there at the Top If you have a broiler that's hyper aggressive and it is just like on fire maybe it needs to come down a little bit so know your equipment and be able to adjust based on what your equipment needs are and what you equipment you have versus exactly what the recipe says if that makes sense so this is such an easy recipe we're done it's in the oven it's toasting we're going to finish it with a little bit of a flake sea salt and some chopped parsley um and then it is ready to go it is ready to serve okay let's talk about parsley flat parsley flat Italian parsley I like to say Italian parsley I would not use a curly parsley curly par parsley actually tastes a little bit different than a flat leaf parsley uh flat leaf parsley or Italian parsley is the parsley of choice in most Italian cooking so I like we're just going to pull a little bit out of here and then we're going to just cut some of that parsley off just like that I like to kind of use a little bit of stem I'm fine with stem especially if it's up higher it's completely acceptable without question the stem at the bottom is a little bit more sort of grassy a little bit more sort of soil kind of flavor so I like to stay away from the base of that parsley that being said I'm 100% going to keep the parsley woo look at that right out of the oven so perfect the edges are perfectly toasted the butter is actually bubbly in there the anchovy is just kissed with a little bit of heat and that brings out that beautiful um oily fish kind of a flavor and that natural salinity we're going to top it with some Italian parsley and this is good to go so Italian flat leaf parsley is here the stems we're not using we will use the stems in something else like a base of a soup we can also use the stems in stock we can also use the stems in any kind of braze you can wrap it in a cheesecloth you can also uh wrap it in a little bit of twine and it gives a great flavor to any sort of stock or any sort of braze so we're just going to run our knife Over The Parsley just like that we're going to give it a rough chop it doesn't need to be over chopped or small this is really just for a fresh herb that's going to go over this very sort of buttery salty anchovy toast and then it's just going to be finished with some crunchy flake sea salt so move that over to the side salt is ready to go and we are good to plate so I like a board for this kind of dish I mean it just kind of it just reads you know it's just toast at the end of the day we just made a beautiful anchovy garlic toast so I think a board is perfect for it to Plate we're going to just take this bread it is really warm that's okay we're going to get ready to Plate we're just going to cut right through this oh it's like you know when the bread is like soft and you can see the olive oil just kind of soaking and holding on to that bread so good oo okay the bread kind of split right there for me so basically did my job I just have to eat that little piece that little bite was so perfect it was salty it was creamy it was crunchy it's everything that you want and a perfect anchovy toast so the beauty of a flake sea salt is like this is beautiful salinity at its most natural form but I like to take it and kind of crush it in between my fingers right you don't want the large Flex of salt to be so large that it becomes overwhelmingly salty so just between my fingers I just kind of crunch it as I put it onto the bread and then we're just finishing it with some chopped Italian parsley right over the top and I mean manga isn't even the word I would use to describe this I just want to have this with a beautiful glass of prco nibble on it and can't wait for the rest of my meal that's how I feel it's like if I'm starting with anchovie toast I know that the rest of the meal is going to be like whoa knock your socks off so good I mean anchovy toast for the Feast of Seven Fishes it doesn't get better than that okay so this is where it gets difficult it's like which one do I choose they're all so perfect okay I'm going to go for the corner look at that it's like perfectly toasted it's brown all over all that good butter in the center the olive oil the anchovy the crunch one of my absolute favorites the salty from the anchovy and that little bit of malen on top mixed with the ultra creaminess of that grass-fed butter that we were not shy with and all of that olive oil but the beauty is all of that oil and all that fat has created a creamy texture and a crunchy texture because it doesn't feel oily at all and all of that goodness from this highly cured olive oil C cured Italian anchovie is just so beautifully salty mixed with that that butter and the parsley The Parsley just brings it to another level because it's so fresh um it just adds that herbaceousness that the dish needs because it is so much salt and so much butter but it's so good I just want to have this with an appol Spritz and call it a day I would take this whole platter just plop it on my lap and let everyone else eat the other disheseveryone I'm Antonia lefaso welcome to my home so excited to be doing this cook along with you for the Feast of Seven Fishes we're going to do an anchovy toast today with a little bit of olive oil butter flake sea salt Italian Anchovies and parsley this is a great dish for the Feast of Seven Fishes which is a meal primarily made of a bounty of seafood for Christmas Eve I grew up in Long Island New York and we did dishes like this every single year Okay so couple of housekeeping tips that we need to go over let's preheat the oven to a medium high broil you want to make sure that you have both of your wire racks in there at the high top level and also at the medium level we will adjust the toast from the top to the bottom so that it gets nice and brown and evenly browned um and you want to make sure that you have five tablespoons of unsalted high quality grass-fed butter at room temperature all right we are ready to start cooking we'll do a little stretch we'll do a little like roll out the shoulders this is a great recipe I love Anchovies and I specifically love anchovies on crispy buttery Olive oily toasted bread with a ton of salt and garlic and parsley super easy dish but this is about sort of high quality ingredients so we've got a beautiful grass-fed butter unsalted we've got great olive oil we have a flake sea salt that we're going to use and then we have incredible imported Italian anchovies and if anyone has ever spent any time on the Amalfi Coast or anywhere in Italy you will know that the anchovies over there are so different than what we have in the states so please if you can Splurge this time of year do it with an imported anchovy from Italy these products are available online specialty Grocers as well also have these kinds of items okay so let's start with our baguette yes baguettes are French this is an Italian Dish that's okay no one's going to get upset um I like to use I get because it's a little more firm and put together chabata is also another opportunity but for some reason I don't always go for the chabata because the beautiful thing about chabata it's got a lot of ton of holes and I really want this bread to be a little less air rated so I'm going to take the bread I'm going to cut it in half and then we're going to cut it in half again and then long ways okay so just write down the center I want to make sure that my hand is on top I'm using a serrated knife and I'm coming through around and around to have the Bread open Perfectly and you can see what I'm talking about it's a concentrated bread right there are a little bit of ation holes there that are great but this is bread that can really hold up to a ton of fat that olive oil and butter and it can also hold up um to kind of toasting and cooking think about essentially we're making a garlic bread with anchovies um so we've got the baguette trimmed and cut in half we're just going to place it on top of this sheet rack we already have the broiler ready to go it's at a medium to high and then of course we have both of those baking sheets inside of the oven ready to go at the top tier to get nice and brown and the bottom tier so that it gets perfectly golden brown I'm going to take a clove of garlic um and just kind of I just need one clove of garlic so I just kind of pop on the top right hit it very very gently with sort of the base and the my hand and the cloves just kind of open up okay so I only need one clove of garlic here because we're just going to use this as an opportunity to rub the bread with garlic so the original garlic bread is called funa and funa is basically just bread that's been toasted and then rubbed with garlic so we just want to give it like a little bit of garlic Essence if you will so when I cut open the garlic you can see this piece that's open so the skin has been pierced because we don't want the primary flavor to be garlic we want the primary flavor to be fat and anchovies butter and anchovies olive oil and anchovies but the garlic is just really to sort of give that underlining tone when you're like oo it tastes like something there's just a little bit of garlic that's rubbed on here um so we just go ahead top to bottom side to side when you're rubbing your bread with garlic you don't want to do it just in the center right because that Center bite only has garlic you want to go Edge Edge Edge Center Center Center and you want to do it a couple times smell of the garlic is on so great on the bread but again this is just to kind of rub the essence of that garlic the oil of that garlic on this raw bread and then we're going to start with the fat okay so get rid of that we don't need any more of this garlic we're going to start with just a little bit of olive oil and by a little bit of olive oil I mean a lot lot we're just going to generously drizzle olive oil over the top of the bread now why am I using butter and olive oil okay both are flavored right so the olive oil is going to give more flavor to the fat whereas the butter is just going to give this Rich creaminess okay also really kind of allows for a richer Browning so butter tends to Brown very very quickly olive oil has it take a little bit more time so it kind of makes the bread cook a little bit better as the butter allows for it to Brown okay so the bread has been cut olive oil has been drizzled there's a great amount of garlic that's just been rubbed over the top now we're going to do five tablespoons of butter we're just going to spread over the top of the bread okay just like so right over the top so olive oil and butter olive oil butter and garlic right over the top again super simple recipe but really it's about high quality ingredients made in a super special way okay so butter butter from Base to Base side to side we don't want one area that is not covered in butter great here we go done and done so we've got all that butter all that garlic you know this is splurging when you put that much butter and that much garlic just on some toast okay we're going to remove the top of anchovies and we're going to generously Place anchovies throughout the area so I like to kind of not mess with the anchovies too much in here we're going to pull them out let's see so oh beautiful look how beautifully pink and cured they are in olive oil we're going to just lay them out and we're going to cut them halfway on a bias and then just arrange them perfectly on top of that toast right so it's essentially eight pieces per side we're have a good amount of anchovies here so so so good it takes so much for me not to just pop one of these like right into my mouth okay so we're going to start to layer the anchovies we're going to lay the anchovies right onto this buttered olive oil bread so we're just cutting the anchovie on a bias and by a bias I just mean I have the entire filet and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to slice it with my knife on an angle right so it's not a blunt end there's kind of like a a a little rectangular shape at the end and then I just just want the anchovie to really be sort of every inch in Between the Bread so inch between each layer okay we don't want it stacked with anchovies anchovies are very aggressive in flavor they have high salinity um and they just have that beautiful oily type of fish flavor that we love but can be very very aggressive so I always say a little bit of anchovy goes along long way so don't feel like you have to really overcrowd the bread with anchovies now if you are an anchovy fanatic and your entire family is an anchovy fanatic please feel free to put as much anchovie on here as you'd like but I'm going to go with an inch in between all and we just want to kind of layer them I mean it looks so simple and so easy and this is also something that you can do ahead of time right so we're looking for the Feast of Seven Fishes which is Christmas Eve a lot of cooking to be done right lot of lot lot of prep to be done so a day in advance a lot of stuff can be done you can cut your anchovies ahead of time you can cut your bread ahead of time but then rewrap it so that it doesn't go uh bad or get stale and so you can have all this ready to go but then I would maybe make them the morning of and you can leave them like this olive oil buttered and then just kind of left on a sheet tray wrapped and right before you're getting ready to serve pull it out and put it into the broiler and toast it's also one of those dishes that after the bread is toasted and beautifully crusted you know and even with the parsley on it it's a dish that can sit for a long period of time on a table if you have a ton of people over there's like a buffet lined up this anchovy toast is not going to die it's going to live on the table for a long time let me wash my hands so essentially you can make this early morning of Christmas Eve wrap it and hold it and get it ready just to pop into the broiler right before you guys are going to get ready to eat or serve look how beautiful that looks it's all the olive oil the butter the garlic and all those anchovies lined up like perfect little anchovy soldiers I'm going to pop it into the oven I'm going to put it medium high right we've got it medium high and we're just going to let these toes and I always like to say the broiler is a dangerous dangerous tool in the kitchen not because it's unsafe but because we always tend to forget what's in the broiler it happens all the time how many bagels have you burned how many pieces of toast have you burned garlic bread oh my goodness all day so I always feel like there should be a timer on even if you know that you're going to you know you're like I'm not going to forget I'm not going to forget don't worry I'm not going to forget everyone always forgets your kids come in your husband's talking you someone's talking to you you get a phone call before you know it you completely forget that you've got something in the broiler so when I'm teaching someone how to cook I like to talk about equipment and ingredients in theory right so everyone should really pay attention to how their ovens behave right some broilers are so so so strong others maybe if it's an older oven you know are like The Little Engine That Could so you may need to really put the you know if it's a broiler that's having a little bit of a hard time really holding its heat maybe the toast is right up there at the Top If you have a broiler that's hyper aggressive and it is just like on fire maybe it needs to come down a little bit so know your equipment and be able to adjust based on what your equipment needs are and what you equipment you have versus exactly what the recipe says if that makes sense so this is such an easy recipe we're done it's in the oven it's toasting we're going to finish it with a little bit of a flake sea salt and some chopped parsley um and then it is ready to go it is ready to serve okay let's talk about parsley flat parsley flat Italian parsley I like to say Italian parsley I would not use a curly parsley curly par parsley actually tastes a little bit different than a flat leaf parsley uh flat leaf parsley or Italian parsley is the parsley of choice in most Italian cooking so I like we're just going to pull a little bit out of here and then we're going to just cut some of that parsley off just like that I like to kind of use a little bit of stem I'm fine with stem especially if it's up higher it's completely acceptable without question the stem at the bottom is a little bit more sort of grassy a little bit more sort of soil kind of flavor so I like to stay away from the base of that parsley that being said I'm 100% going to keep the parsley woo look at that right out of the oven so perfect the edges are perfectly toasted the butter is actually bubbly in there the anchovy is just kissed with a little bit of heat and that brings out that beautiful um oily fish kind of a flavor and that natural salinity we're going to top it with some Italian parsley and this is good to go so Italian flat leaf parsley is here the stems we're not using we will use the stems in something else like a base of a soup we can also use the stems in stock we can also use the stems in any kind of braze you can wrap it in a cheesecloth you can also uh wrap it in a little bit of twine and it gives a great flavor to any sort of stock or any sort of braze so we're just going to run our knife Over The Parsley just like that we're going to give it a rough chop it doesn't need to be over chopped or small this is really just for a fresh herb that's going to go over this very sort of buttery salty anchovy toast and then it's just going to be finished with some crunchy flake sea salt so move that over to the side salt is ready to go and we are good to plate so I like a board for this kind of dish I mean it just kind of it just reads you know it's just toast at the end of the day we just made a beautiful anchovy garlic toast so I think a board is perfect for it to Plate we're going to just take this bread it is really warm that's okay we're going to get ready to Plate we're just going to cut right through this oh it's like you know when the bread is like soft and you can see the olive oil just kind of soaking and holding on to that bread so good oo okay the bread kind of split right there for me so basically did my job I just have to eat that little piece that little bite was so perfect it was salty it was creamy it was crunchy it's everything that you want and a perfect anchovy toast so the beauty of a flake sea salt is like this is beautiful salinity at its most natural form but I like to take it and kind of crush it in between my fingers right you don't want the large Flex of salt to be so large that it becomes overwhelmingly salty so just between my fingers I just kind of crunch it as I put it onto the bread and then we're just finishing it with some chopped Italian parsley right over the top and I mean manga isn't even the word I would use to describe this I just want to have this with a beautiful glass of prco nibble on it and can't wait for the rest of my meal that's how I feel it's like if I'm starting with anchovie toast I know that the rest of the meal is going to be like whoa knock your socks off so good I mean anchovy toast for the Feast of Seven Fishes it doesn't get better than that okay so this is where it gets difficult it's like which one do I choose they're all so perfect okay I'm going to go for the corner look at that it's like perfectly toasted it's brown all over all that good butter in the center the olive oil the anchovy the crunch one of my absolute favorites the salty from the anchovy and that little bit of malen on top mixed with the ultra creaminess of that grass-fed butter that we were not shy with and all of that olive oil but the beauty is all of that oil and all that fat has created a creamy texture and a crunchy texture because it doesn't feel oily at all and all of that goodness from this highly cured olive oil C cured Italian anchovie is just so beautifully salty mixed with that that butter and the parsley The Parsley just brings it to another level because it's so fresh um it just adds that herbaceousness that the dish needs because it is so much salt and so much butter but it's so good I just want to have this with an appol Spritz and call it a day I would take this whole platter just plop it on my lap and let everyone else eat the other dishes\n"