This Tuscan salad is a great way of using up stale bread (ideally sourdough or a similar ‘country style’ loaf) as well as a glut of tomatoes from the garden. There are many versions of this favourite Italian salad, but here I’m providing you with my simple version of Panzanella that is a family favourite – and ensures the current loaf of sourdough in the bread bin doesn’t go to waste.
Panzanella recipe debate
The recipe for Panzanella salad can create a lot of debate. At the core, everyone is in agreement that it’s leftover stale bread and tomatoes. However, what you put in the bowl in addition to this can vary a lot. At the end of the day it comes down to preference and I’m sharing with you the version that is tried and tested in our household. Feel free to experiment and come up with your own twist to this Tuscan tomato dish.
Stale sourdough bread
As I’m an avid sourdough baker (check out my overnight sourdough recipe), I like to bake 1-2 times a week, and depending on how many people are in the house we might not get through all the loaves before they start to go past their best. This recipe is great in the summer for using up a loaf that has been sat around for at least 2-3 days. If your bread isn’t stale enough you can quickly pop the small chunks of bread on a baking tray in the oven and roast for 5 mins to dry it out.
If I’m not making this recipe, and it’s winter time and I don’t have access to great tasting tomatoes, then other ways to ensure you’re not letting your tasty sourdough bread go to waste are:
- Cut the crusts off and blitz in a food processer for a couple of minutes until you have fine breadcrumbs. Pop in a container in the freezer and you’ll have instant breadcrumbs to top a pasta bake or coat a flatten chicken breast.
- Cut the crusts off and then cut into 1cm cubes and place in the freezer. A great addition to a chicken Caesar salad – simply defrost in a bowl, toss through some olive oil and roast for 10 minutes or so to create beautifully crispy croutons. These are also great in the air fryer.
- Slice the bread and place in the freezer for instant toast when you run out!
Other tomato recipes
Here are some other ways to create tasty tomato dishes:
Growing tomatoes
I absolutely love it when it’s time to plant tomato seeds indoors at the end of January/early February. Let’s face it, it’s not the cheeriest of seasons in the year. With the post Holiday blues, short days, and likely cold and wet weather, it’s a joy to be start off the planting calendar and a new year in the garden.
From their tiny seeds to the first seedlings, and then nurturing them outdoors in the greenhouse (or continuing indoors) until the temperatures in May are warm enough, it’s a long journey. And once they are planted outside, that’s when the real labour of love begins! With frequent watering, pruning, and feeding with nutrients such as coffee grinds and crushed eggshells (yes, I even cooked up cleaned egg shells and crush them to sprinkle on the roots of my tomatoes!), until you reach harvest time in late July through to September. Then you are rewarded with the long-awaited taste of freshly picked tomatoes. None of that watery, supermarket, nonsense, that looks like a tomato but tastes very far from it with flesh as hard as bullets. So is it all worth it… of course it is!!
Varieties of tomatoes to grow
I normally plant a variety of shapes and sizes. From the large Beefsteak and Marmande, to the mid-sized normally high producers such as Alicante, Crimson Crush, Roma, Moneymaker, and then there are the small and sweet cherry tomatoes where I go for the likes of Tumbling Tom, or sweet success.
If you are short on time, you can always use a jar of roasted red peppers as a quick alternative. Although you do lose the texture of the fresh roasted pepper, but maintain that roasted pepper flavour. To replace 2 large red peppers, substitute in 250g of weight of roasted red peppers from a jar.
Panzanella
Ingredients
- 2 red peppers see below note
- 1/2 stale loaf of sourdough 3-4 days old
- 500 g mixed tomatoes
- 2 anchovy fillets
- 1/2 tsp sea salt
- 1 garlic clove
- 100 ml extra virgin olive oil
- 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
- 1 tsp capers
- 1 small red onion
- 1/2 cucumber
- 1 handful of fresh basil leaves
Instructions
- Preheat the grill and place the red peppers in a tray under the grill. Turn regularly to char all sides and starting to blister. Alternatively, you can do this on a gas ring. Whichever method you choose, you cannot leave them alone and should keep a close eye on them. Both methods should take around 10 minutes.
- When blackened almost all over, put the peppers in a sealed plastic bag, or covered bowl, to allow them to steam and cool for 10 minutes. You can now skin them, remove the seeds and cut them into 1cm strips – catching any juices from the inside of the peppers.
- Take your sourdough, or similar bread, remove the crusts and cut roughly into 2cm pieces. If your bread isn't stale enough, now is the time to pop it on a baking tray in the oven for 5-10 minutes to dry it out.
- While the peppers are cooling, you can make the dressing. Taking half of the tomatoes – use the larger ones for the dressing, keeping the smaller ones aside that will go into the salad whole – score the skins with a cross on the base, place them in a bowl, and submerge them in boiling water for 1 minute. Carefully remove them and peel off their skins. If the tomatoes are ripe this should be pretty easy.
- I use a small plastic board for this, which is easy to clean in the dishwasher, and placing the anchovy fillets on the board I scrape them in a circular motion with the flat side of the knife. Doing this a few times will create an anchovy paste. To this I add 1/2 tsp sea salt and chop and crush the garlic clove into the anchovy paste.
- In a large mixing bowl add the anchovy and garlic paste, squeeze in the skinned tomatoes, ensuring you get a lot of pulp and juice. Add the olive oil, red wine vinegar and capers and mix everything together well.
- Add the stale bread cubes and the grilled pepper slices and give everything a good mix. You want the bread to soak up all the beautiful tomato juices along with the flavours of the dressing.
- Peel, halve and slice your red onion. Cut the cucumber in half and de-seed using a teaspoon then slice roughly and add this to the mixing bowl with the crushed tomatoes and dressing.
- Finally, roughly chop up the remaining mix of tomatoes, and together with a handful of basil leaves, throw this into the mixing bowl and season well with freshly ground black pepper. Give everything a really good mix.
- As this is a messy business, I now normally tip this into a presentation bowl ready for the table.
