I had some of that wonderful Pane di Altamura left over and it was getting stale. When life gives you stale bread make panzanella! Panzanella pretty much epitomizes summer in Tuscany. It’s a salad of bread, tomatoes, red onion, cukes and basil and dressed with red wine vinegar and extra virgin olive oil..and salt to taste.
You might ask what bread is doing in this salad. Stale bread shows up in a lot of Tuscan cooking. Tuscan cooking is very much based on “la cucina povera”. It’s how the Tuscans cooked ( and still do) and used everything that was available to them. Nothing was thrown out and there was little money and a family to feed. Bread stretched things out and potatoes did too. But more on the potatoes at another time.
Here’s how you do it:
Soak your stale bread in some cold water to loosen it up. Break it into chunks and squeeze out the excess water. Add the moistened bread to a bowl. Now, ascolta! This is important! Make sure you have a hearty country style bread because otherwise it’s going to disintegrate. Think your bread is too stale? Mine was like a brick and it still worked beautifully. And actually the pane di altamura is from Puglia (shhh, don’t tell) and there is salt in the bread unlike the Tuscan bread which has zero salt. It made the salad that much better.
Next chop some tomatoes. Lots of them, after all, it is a bread and tomato salad. Chop or slice a red onion as much as you want. Add both to the bowl with the squeezed out bread. Tear a handful of basil leaves into the bowl and then add some sliced/chopped cukes.
All of the cukes that were in the kitchen were about to be made into pickles so I managed to snag a few slices that I had reserved for soaking in my Hendrick’s Gin on the rocks. This was before I decided to make the panzanella. In fact, they WERE soaking in the gin when I snatched them out (I could’ve used more..cukes, not gin) but enough to achieve the cuke freshness that is essential to panzanella. They certainly were crispy.
I lightly doused the mix with EVOO and red wine vinegar added some salt (I had just bought Penzey’s Shallot Salt and tried that) tossed it and that’s that. I let it sit for a few minutes so the flavors could harmonize and then served
Tuscan food is noted for it’s simplicity. Don’t go getting fancy with panzanella. It’s perfect exactly the way it is.
The Tuscan Heart 