Our low-sodium, low-saturated fat hors d’oeuvre is simple to prepare, festively elegant and absolutely delicious.
Preparing the individual bread slices can be done a day or two in advance. Just store the toasted bread in a tightly sealed bag until ready to assemble.
The simple, two-ingredient cheese topping features part-skim ricotta cheese. Ricotta cheese is similar to a fine-textured cottage cheese with a slightly sweet flavor. When beaten, it becomes smooth and somewhat silky.
Ricotta cheese comes in whole milk, part-skim (reduced-fat), low-fat (light) and fat-free forms. While whole-milk ricotta is the creamiest, it contains the most saturated fat. Low-fat and fat-free versions have little or no saturated fat, but lack flavor and have a crumbly, almost gritty texture. We opted for part-skim ricotta which had a good, creamy texture, yet kept our saturated fat content in check.