PANZANELLA!
Panzanella is a Florentine salad of bread and tomatoes popular in the summer. It includes chunks of soaked stale bread and tomatoes, sometimes also onions and basil, dressed with olive oil and vinegar. It is also popular in other parts of central Italy (taken from Wikipedia)!!
As anyone who’s ever been to France knows, there are no preservatives in traditional french bread and so it really is only good on the day that you buy it.
I’ve been wondering what to do every time we have left over bread and wanted to do more than simply make breadcrumbs or croutons for the freezer. It wasn’t until my sister, Oona, arrived that she suggested panzanella and so after looking up a couple of recipes, we’ve adapted it to make it our own and having had it for the last 2 days (and possibly again today - I’ve been ‘overbuying’ bread again!!), can report back that it’s rather delicious and a most excellent way to not only use up the stale bread but to incorporate the tomatoes that we’re harvesting daily from our garden.
In addition, we seem to now be in competition with our neighbours as to who can give away the most from the garden - they’re currently winning by a rather large margin given their garden was not only planted much earlier than ours it’s also considerably bigger - having given them 3 of our first yellow courgettes yesterday, I was caught in my pyjamas this morning by ‘Madame’ as she came into the courtyard carrying a large bag containing aubergines, tomatoes, lettuce (a lovely french lettuce they grow called ‘la reine de glace’), rosemary, thyme, parsley & oregano - photo of our winnings below. I mentioned I’m enjoying the tomatoes in Panzanella and described it to her to which she responded ‘oh well you’ll need some garlic then - please pass by the house later and if I’m not in I’ll leave some in a bag hanging off the gate’!!! It would appear that their generosity and kindness knows no bounds - we feel so blessed to have them as our neighbours and look forward to having them over for lunch again perhaps next week - in the meantime I’ll see what I can create with the bounty from their garden for our lunch....
My version of Panzanella
Cut up the bread (at least a day old if not longer) into bite sized chunks and lay them on a baking sheet
Toss them in some olive oil (about 6 cups of loosely packed bread chunks to about 1/3 cup olive oil)
Preheat your oven to about 200 degrees and toast the croutons until golden - you may have to turn them once - this will take about 10-20 minutes.
While the bread is in the oven - take about another 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil and whisk in 2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar.
Crush a glove of garlic into the vinaigrette and give it a good mix
Add the following,
a couple of large tomatoes cut into chunks
some peeled and sliced cucumber
some thinly sliced red onion
A generous handful of basil leaves (if you don’t like basil, use parsley)
Pitted black olives (optional)
Crumbled feta cheese (or for a more traditionally Italian salad use mozzarella)
A little salt and black pepper
(IF you happen to have a glut of delicious yellow courgettes, take your potato peeler and thinly slice them lengthways and toss these in also - adds a beautiful colour and delicous flavour)
Once the bread has been toasted and cooled, toss the croutons in - give it a good mix - allow it to stand for about 15 minutes to allow the bread to soak up some juice and SERVE!
Bon Apetit!
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