Panzanella for the First Warm Evening
Stale bread, ripe tomatoes, and an aggressive amount of basil. The salad that tastes like the first dinner you eat outside all year.
There is one evening every year — you know the one — when it is suddenly warm enough to eat outside, and the whole meal needs to taste like that feeling. In my kitchen, that meal is panzanella: the Tuscan answer to the question of what to do with bread that went stale and tomatoes that are finally, finally good.
The trick is not to fight the sogginess — it is to aim it. The bread should drink the tomato juice and olive oil until it is soft at the edges but still has a little chew in the middle. Ten minutes of resting is the difference between bread salad and bread soup.
The recipe
Serves 4 as a main
Ingredients
- Half a loaf of stale crusty bread, torn
- 800 g ripe heirloom tomatoes, chopped
- 1 small red onion, shaved thin
- A very large handful of basil, torn
- 80 ml best olive oil
- 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
- 1 garlic clove, grated
- Salt and lots of black pepper
Method
- 01Toss the tomatoes with a big pinch of salt in a large bowl and let them sit 15 minutes until they give up their juice.
- 02Whisk the olive oil, vinegar, and garlic into the tomato juice at the bottom of the bowl.
- 03Add the bread and onion, toss hard, and rest 10 minutes — no more, no less.
- 04Fold in the basil, taste for salt, and finish with more oil and pepper than seems reasonable.
“Stale bread is not a problem. It is an ingredient with a head start.”
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