Bread salad? Are you kidding?

 

Bread salad

No, I don’t mean tossing some croutons out of a box and onto a bunch of lettuce and then drowning the whole thing in bottled Italian dressing. Panzanella has a long history in Tuscany and other sections of Italy. Food historians have even found a sixteenth-century poet who sang about onions in oil and vinegar served with toast. Until modern times, panzanella was all about onions, not tomatoes. The name is thought to come from a combination of “pane,” Italian for bread, and “zanella,” which is a deep dish, rather like a soup or salad plate.

Panzanella is generally considered to consist of cubes of stale bread, tomatoes, and onions in a vinaigrette. But in today’s kitchen you can throw in almost anything you want—lettuce, cucumber, celery, hard-boiled eggs, parsley, bell peppers, etc. Purists will frown at you, but, hey! It’s your salad.

Some recipes call for soaking the bread cubes in water so that they will soften and absorb the dressing. I prefer to have them hard. The vinaigrette marinates and softens them if you let the salad sit before serving. I would not recommend pre-packaged croutons for this.

For a long time, I sort of wondered about panzanella, not sure how I felt about bread salad. I knew for sure Jordan wouldn’t eat it, because she doesn’t even want croutons in a regular salad. But one night I made it when Jean came to supper, and we both loved it. We also found it was filling enough for a meal, though I have sometimes put some cottage cheese next to it. Okay, that’s my idiosyncrasy. You may laugh or recoil in horror.

Here's what I did:

To make the croutons (this will make enough for a salad for ten or twelve, but they are a bit of a pain to make and they freeze beautifully):

8-10 cups of cubed artisan bread (one-inch cubes), crusts removed only if you want/

Spread the bread in a single layer in a roasting pan and let it sit out overnight, so that the cubes become stale and hard. If you don’t have time, you can bake them for twenty minutes in a 300^o oven but watch that they don’t burn.

For the salad: (will serve two to three)

1 large heirloom tomato, chopped

¼ cucumber, diced

½ small red onion, sliced

For the dressing:

¼ cup olive oil

1/8 cup red wine vinegar

¼ tsp. salt

Pinch of fine ground pepper

Five or six finely sliced basil leaves – add just before serving

Combine the vegetables and about 3-4 cups croutons in a salad bowl. Pour dressing over and toss. Let the salad sit for at least one-half hour at room temperature before serving. It can sit as long as four hours and will only get better. Toss occasionally during this time. Add basil just before serving.

Pour a glass of good red Italian wine and enjoy!