There’s nothing like a salty refreshing crunch from a pickle to inspire this summer’s new most exciting crunchy appetizer. Spread some tangy dill ricotta over toasted crostini topped with a couple of slices of your favorite pickles and wham-ela Anderson, you’ve got yourself a tasty treat. I always say to dinner guests at our cooking classes at Table for 12, you can spread anything on top of a crostini and I would eat it. It just tastes better on crispy and tender bread slices. Do you have a pickle lover in your circle? We all have them. Make sure to feed that lover one of these bites and let me know what they think!

This recipe is affordable and just plain convenient, so PLEASE splurge on some good pickles, will ya? A well-made pickle is meant to be sour and salty with quite an addicting flavor from the dill and mustard seeds. Crunchy is a given. Good pickles shouldn’t make your mouth sore from the salt or slide between your teeth like rubber because they’ve been sitting too long. The challenge of pickle making is timing the pickling process to present the best snappy pickle. When choosing a pickle in the store, I always tend to go with smaller whole pickles over pre-sliced or spears. They tend to get less soggy and rubbery in their whole form. I even tend to slightly shake the pickle jar when I’m browsing to make sure the little guys are firm. My favorite store-bought pickle is Claussen.

I always keep a frozen baguette on hand, just in case some last-minute appetizer needs to be made. Baguettes are great to keep frozen because they thaw pretty quickly and nestle into small corners of your freezer, making for a great all-purpose ingredient. My go-to recipe with my baguette is to make crostini and serve it with some dairy-based dip to snack on. Sometimes I just snack on the plain crostini.

To make the perfect crostini, you start with good olive oil. This is the time to bust out that expensive stuff you bought from Greece that one time or were gifted from last Christmas. You want a nice crispy toast and fat does the trick. Next step, to season your crostini with salt and pepper. You’re serving bread with olive oil, it needs to have some flavor to amplify the bread’s natural flavor. Lastly, you need to only toast the outside crust of the crostini. Don’t take the toasts too far in the oven. It’s a beginner mistake. The inside of the crostini should be slightly chewy with a light toasted exterior. Think of toasted bread in the toaster. You don’t want just one dry crunch of toast.

Ricotta is a great base to carry most flavor, such as dill. It has a very plain taste to it, which makes it an excellent candidate to incorporate the pickles sour flavor. Leftovers of this ricotta? Use it on your next sandwich to add a tangy lemony bite. I do this all the time!