Strawberry Goat Cheese Bruschetta

Strawberry goat cheese bruschetta with honey and mint will help you enjoy and share the season’s best. Developed with love once upon a time for WNYC. Ready in 20 minutes.

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Why we love this recipe

Strawberry goat cheese bruschetta makes a sweet and savory snack or starter. It’s a great way to highlight best-of-season strawberries and share them with friends. It’s layered with:

• Perfectly crisp, toasty baguette slices
• Creamy fresh goat cheese enhanced with a bit of honey and lemon juice
• Ruby red strawberries speckled with mint and sweetened with a dash of honey
• All finished with flaky salt, a sprinkle of pepper, and a little more honey if you like

I first published this recipe here and with WNYC back in 2010. I’ve since updated the post for clarity and tweaked the recipe a bit. If you’re a fan of old-school blog stories, you can scroll below the recipe card to read the original post.

What you’ll need

Here’s a glance at the ingredients you’ll need to make this recipe.

• If you can find diminutive, perfectly ripe local strawberries, this is a great place to use them. If not, you can totally make this recipe with supermarket strawberries too.
• I like to use a run-of-the-mill mild-tasting honey from the supermarket. You can use whatever kind you really like.
• A little bit of fresh mint pairs beautifully with the strawberries, honey, and goat cheese. Basil (also in the mint family) makes a great alternative if you feel like changing it up.
• Fresh goat cheese (also called chèvre) is creamy, tangy, and savory. It’s a beautiful way to bridge the sweet and savory elements in this recipe. You could substitute ricotta if you like, with no further changes to the recipe.

How to make it

Here’s an overview of what you’ll do to make strawberry goat cheese bruschetta. You can see the steps in action in the video that accompanies this post, and get all the details in the recipe card below.

1. Slice the bread on the bias, brush it with olive oil, and toast it in the oven.
2. Mix the goat cheese with lemon juice and honey.
3. Halve the strawberries if small, or slice if large, and stir them together with mint and honey. Leave to macerate for a bit.
4. Assemble the bruschetta by spreading some goat cheese mixture onto each toast, topping with a few pieces of strawberry, and sprinkling with flaky salt and pepper. Drizzle with a bit more honey if you like, and serve.

Expert tips and FAQs

More favorite recipes with strawberries

• Auga fresca
• Turnovers
• Crisp
• Tarts
• Jam
• Compote
• Sauce for ice cream and cheesecake

More favorite bruschetta recipes

• Butternut squash bruschetta with sage and pomegranate
• Mushroom bruschetta

5 from 1 vote

Strawberry Goat Cheese Bruschetta

By Carolyn Gratzer Cope

Strawberry goat cheese bruschetta with honey and mint will help you enjoy and share the season's best. Developed for WNYC.

Prep: 10 minutes mins

Cook: 10 minutes mins

Total: 20 minutes mins

Servings: 16

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Ingredients 

1x2x3x

• ▢ ½ baguette, cut on the bias into 1/4-inch slices
• ▢ 2 tablespoons olive oil
• ▢ ½ pound (225 grams) strawberries
• ▢ 2 tablespoons (42 grams) mild-tasting honey, divided, plus more for drizzling
• ▢ 1 tablespoon minced mint leaves
• ▢ 4 ounces (114 grams) fresh goat cheese (chèvre), at room temperature
• ▢ 1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
• ▢ ½ teaspoon flaky sea salt
• ▢ Freshly ground black pepper

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Instructions 

• Preheat the oven to 400°F with a rack in the center.
• Brush the baguette slices with olive oil on both sides and place on a baking sheet. Bake until crisp, 10-15 minutes total, flipping each slice once about halfway through cooking.
• Remove stems and leaves from strawberries and halve if small or slice if large.
• Place strawberries into a mixing bowl and stir together with 1 tablespoon of the honey and the mint. Let sit at room temperature while you prepare the rest of the components.
• In a small bowl, mix together the goat cheese, remaining tablespoon of honey, and the lemon juice.
• To assemble the bruschetta, spread some of the goat cheese mixture on each slice, and top with a few pieces of strawberry. Arrange the hors d’oeuvres on a platter and drizzle a bit more honey over each piece. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Serve at once.

Notes

1. If you can find diminutive, perfectly ripe local strawberries, this is a great place to use them. If not, you can totally make this recipe with supermarket strawberries too.
2. I like to use a run-of-the-mill mild-tasting honey from the supermarket. You can use whatever kind you really like.
3. A little bit of fresh mint pairs beautifully with the strawberries, honey, and goat cheese. Basil (also in the mint family) makes a great alternative if you feel like changing it up.
4. Fresh goat cheese (also called chèvre) is creamy, tangy, and savory. It’s a beautiful way to bridge the sweet and savory elements in this recipe. You could substitute ricotta if you like, with no further changes to the recipe.
5. Instead of strawberries, try apricots in the spring, sliced ripe nectarines or halved cherries in the summer, quartered figs (prepared according to this recipe or like this), or very thinly sliced (or stewed) green apple or pear in the fall and winter.
6. Instead of goat cheese, you could substitute ricotta, mascarpone, cream cheese, or a nondairy version of any of those options if you need it.
7. Bruschetta are quick to make, and it’s best to assemble them shortly before serving. You can cut and macerate the strawberries, toast the bread, and mix the goat cheese up to 24 hours in advance, storing the elements separately.
8. Leftover assembled bruschetta should be eaten on the same day, but the individual elements will keep for up to about three days — strawberries and goat cheese in airtight containers in the fridge, and toast wrapped in foil at room temperature.

Nutrition

Serving: 1piece, Calories: 50kcal, Carbohydrates: 4g, Protein: 2g, Fat: 3g, Saturated Fat: 1g, Polyunsaturated Fat: 2g, Cholesterol: 3mg, Sodium: 116mg, Sugar: 2g

Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.

Additional Info

Course: Snacks and Starters

Cuisine: American

Tried this recipe?Mention @umamigirl or tag #umamigirl!

Strawberries on NPR’s All Things Considered

Yesterday I got to take a break from my provincial routine of thinking and writing about fruits, veggies and the prospect of raising chickens to go to the big city and talk about my provincial routine of thinking and writing about fruits, veggies and the prospect of raising chickens.

Also? I got to do the talking on my favorite radio station. So that was a little different.

I spoke with Amy Eddings on the All Things Considered segment called Last Chance Foods, which features foods soon to go out of season. The sultry, succulent stars this week were fresh-picked strawberries.

Strawberry picking for research purposes

For “research purposes only,” I went strawberry picking last week at the utterly charming Earth Friendly Organic Farm in Clarksburg, NJ. It’s a shining example of a tiny farm using lovingly attentive organic practices but without organic certification, one of the more important topics we touched on in the WNYC interview.

If you’re local, you should definitely pay a visit this season. But watch out—these folks play hardball where charm is concerned. There’s a three-room Bed and Breakfast on the premises, and co-owner Michael Diehl, 83, may introduce you to his three-year-old orchard as “an exercise in optimism, an 80-year-old planting fruit trees.” What’s a girl to do with a line like that?

They’ll have blueberries, raspberries and blackberries later in the season, and there are fresh eggs daily.

Eating seasonally

All of this strawberry talk, along with a couple of thoughts and articles, has really got me thinking about the nature of eating seasonally in a culture of instant—if plasticized—gratification. Real live strawberries, the stain-your-fingers kind you pick from a farm or in a blue quart container at the farmers’ market, are a true seasonal delicacy, fleeting and fragile and special.

Cold winter months of eager anticipation, a mid-spring full of uncertainty about the weather’s effect on quality and yield, and then, finally, with luck, a few weeks of abundance so furious you have to haul out your biggest baking sheets, widest canning pots and strongest neighbors just to keep from drowning. That’s what eating seasonally is supposed to feel like.

And if you search really hard, spend kind of a lot of money, and cover your ears and hum every once in a while, you really can make that happen in the next few weeks.

(Hi, I was kind of unbearable when I wrote this, but I’m leaving it.)

But then there’s the alternative—the plastic supermarket clamshells with the strawberry simulacra inside, trucked in from California or, when it’s really cold, Mexico. They’re always there, so they’ve got that going for them. But have you noticed how they rather delight in treating you as though, having made the foolish choice not to live in California, you really don’t deserve any better than whatever you happen to get? They’re no different from most of pop culture that way, so you can’t blame them too much.

And it’s not that they’re inedible or pure evil or anything (though they are a member of the Dirty Dozen, so caveat emptor)—it’s just that they’re not really strawberries in any sense of the word that I’d like to go on the radio to talk about.

But wait, don’t go.

I’d bet that most of you reading this blog or listening to NPR have tasted real strawberries. But I’d bet even more that the majority of American children in 2010 have not, and that they have no idea they’re missing anything. Probably some of them are pretty sure they don’t even like strawberries, never having been presented with one that’s overly likable. Just something to think about, and maybe move you to throw a couple of handfuls of wild strawberry seeds out your car window the next time the mood strikes.

You can listen to the interview here on WNYC’s culture page.

Before you go, though, weigh in! Where are you getting your strawberries this year? Do you hold out for the real thing or settle (gladly or otherwise) for the supermarket? And if you do hold out for truly seasonal strawberries and other foods, what do you do with your cognitive dissonance when you pass those judgmental Californian berries in the store? Leave a comment and let us know.