Panzanella Is a Salad Built to Use Up Stale Bread, and the Tomatoes Came Later

The recipe below uses the modern method with one traditional idea kept: the bread sits in the tomato juices for a while before serving, so it is neither soggy nor a crouton, but somewhere in between. Use a proper open-crumbed loaf, a day or two old. Soft sliced bread dissolves.

Ingredients, for four

• 300 g stale sourdough or country bread, crusts on, torn into rough 3 cm pieces
• 800 g ripe tomatoes, a mix of sizes and colours if you can, at room temperature
• 1 small red onion, very finely sliced
• 1 cucumber, peeled in stripes, halved, seeded and sliced
• A large handful of basil leaves
• 2 tablespoons capers, rinsed, optional
• 120 ml extra virgin olive oil
• 3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
• 1 clove garlic, crushed to a paste with salt
• Flaky salt and black pepper

Method

1. Put the sliced onion in a small bowl with one tablespoon of the vinegar and a pinch of salt and leave it while you do everything else. This takes the raw edge off.
2. Heat the oven to 200°C. Toss the bread with three tablespoons of the oil and a pinch of salt on a tray and bake for ten to twelve minutes, turning once, until golden at the edges but still with some give in the middle. Cool.
3. Cut the tomatoes into chunks over a large bowl to catch the juice. Season generously with salt and leave for ten minutes; they will release more liquid, which is the dressing's base.
4. Whisk the remaining oil and vinegar with the garlic paste and plenty of pepper. Pour over the tomatoes.
5. Add the bread, the drained onion, the cucumber and the capers if using. Toss well, then leave for twenty to thirty minutes at room temperature, tossing once or twice, so the bread drinks the juices.
6. Just before serving, tear in the basil, check the seasoning, and add a final pour of oil and a splash more vinegar if it needs lifting. It should be sharp.

Notes

The tomatoes decide the dish. Underripe supermarket tomatoes give a salad of oily bread and disappointment; ripe, heavy, fragrant ones give one of the best summer dishes in Europe. In the Gulf this argues for the small, sweet local and regional tomatoes of late autumn through spring rather than the pale imports of high summer, and for never refrigerating them.

Panzanella does not keep. After an hour it is at its best; after three it has gone soft; the next day it is a different, softer dish that the traditional school would recognise. Make it to eat.

Additions that belong: anchovies, olives, a boiled egg, roasted peppers, tuna. Additions that do not: lettuce, which makes it a different salad, and mozzarella, which makes it a caprese with bread in it. For the Levantine dish built on exactly the same idea, stale bread revived by a sharp dressing and summer vegetables, see our fattoush recipe; the two salads are cousins separated by a sea, and for a cold Spanish soup that starts from the same three ingredients, see our gazpacho.