Panzanella, a tuscan tomato bread salad
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Cool summer salad for those sweltering hot days.
This salad with it’s tuscan contadini-farmer roots, is an interesting way to combine bread and fresh ingredients together.
Ingredients for 6
- 1- 1lb piece of hard crusted italian bread
- 15 medium size ripe cherry tomatoes
- 2 medium sized cucumbers
- 1 medium sized red onion
- small hand full of fresh basil leaves
- 5-6 table spoons of extra virgin olive oil
- 3 table spoons of a wine vinegar
- 1 normal size can or jar of tuna fish in oil (optional)
- salt and ground black pepper for seasoning
how to prepare, taken from the video
Start by cutting the bread into a couple pieces and soaking it in water. Try to use a bread that has an internal texture without many holes in it, and is compact or stiff.
While the bread is soaking cut up the cherry tomatoes into thin slices and add them to a large salad or mixing bowl.
Next take the skin off the cucumbers and cut them up into thin slices as well. Then clean and slice up the red onion into thin slices, and add them to the bowl with the tomatoes and cucumbers.
After that check the bread and see if it has absorbed the water well, if so it’s ready to be strained out and broken up. Strain the bread out well and break it up into another mixing bowl.
Then cut up 10-12 basil leaves and add them to the tomatoes, cucumbers and onions.
Now it’s time to add the tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and basil into the bowl with the bread. Before mixing add in a few table spoons of extra virgin olive oil, some salt and ground black pepper.
Mix everything together and check the salad to see if there enough olive oil, if the bread and ingredients look a little dry add in more.
Next drain the oil from the tuna fish and cut it up into small pieces and add it to the mix, again check to see if there’s enough olive oil. i added in just a little to compensate for the tuna.
Slowly mix all the ingredients around then cover with plastic-saran wrap and let chill for at least 1hr.
After that take it out and add some wine based vinegar making sure to stir it in.
Now it’s ready to serve, to add a little extra flavor add a “C” of olive oil to the top.
it's about italian food
and sharing how we make it from our kitchen in florence, italy. we enjoy cooking and learning new recipes and hope you will too. buon appetito, and thanks for stopping by. more
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to the tooth, or so your teeth can feel it. ‘dente’ means tooth in italian and ‘al’ means ‘too’ in this case. when eating spaghetti if the center is slightly hard the teeth will feel it.
tomatoes and history
History and distribution of tomatoes from wikipedia. In italy it reads “Eventually the peasant classes discovered that it could be eaten when more desirable food was scarce”. More desirable foods must of been meat dishes.
season to taste
Taste is important, following recommendations of a recipe are good but not always the way you may like it. Look over the ingredients to see which are going to add more seasoning than others, like bacon or pancetta which will add a saltly flavor when cooked.
farm fresh
If you live in a city or town that has local farmstands or a store that sells locally grown produce it’s worth the extra trip. some of the best produce we’ve been lucky to cook with has come from some of these small growers and sellers.
