Classic Panzanella Salad (Tuscan-Style Tomato and Bread Salad) Recipe (2024)

When the temperature dial hits 107°F in my San Mateo backyard it means only one thing: salad for dinner.

The fact that my neighbor down the street was gone for the weekend and had a hyperactive garden overflowing with tomatoes narrowed down my selection considerably. I'd alreadyCaprese'd myself out, sopanzanellait was. The classic bread and tomato salad manages to be fresh and summery, but still hearty enough to eat as lunch or a light supper.

Though it's got a reputation as a Tuscan dish, bread salads are not uncommon elsewhere in the Mediterranean. And let's get one thing straight: panzanella is not a tomato salad with bread; it's abreadsalad flavored with vegetables.

Bread has been a staple food in the Mediterranean region for millennia, and even though they didn't have modern preservatives, they found ways to preserve it, such as drying it out, so it could last for weeks or even months. Dried, stale bread was as common as fresh. Folks developed creative ways to use their loaves; think of it as the way we might use dried pasta or instant ramen. Dishes like panzanella andgazpacho(which is abreadsoup, not a tomato soup!) were the result.

Tomatoes didn't make their way into the classic panzanella recipe until the 16th century at the very earliest (since tomatoes didn't exist in Europe until they were brought back from the Americas), and it's more likely that they arrived far more recently. Writing on panzanella in a16th-century Italian text, the Florentine painter and poet Bronzino says:

"Un'insalata di Cipolla trita con la porcellanetta e cetriuoli vince ogn'altro piacer di questa vita."

That is: "A [bread] salad made with chopped onions, purslane [a type of wild succulent lettuce], and cucumbers surpasses all other pleasures in this life."

According to the fabulously well-researched* 1999 websiteFoodTimeLine.org, we in the United States had no clue what panzanella was until the late 1970s. Imagine: most folks in the US were exposed toAttack of the Killer Tomatoesbefore they were exposed to panzanella!

*Not to mention fabulously Web 1.0.

The panzanella salad has come a long way since then, to the point that it's now an essential recipe of summer for anyone with access to good quality tomatoes. (And let's get another thing straight: good tomatoes are theonlykind of tomatoes this salad should be made with.)

Unlike a Caprese salad, in which I strongly believe that anything beyond tomato, basil, mozzarella, olive oil, salt, and pepper will detract from the experience and simple purity of the dish, a panzanella salad can be made with any number of vegetables.

I enjoy making a goodgrilled-vegetable panzanella, and in the spring I'll make apanzanella with asparagus. Heck, we've even got a recipe forbanhzanella, a panzanella salad with the flavors of abanh misandwich.

But for today, we're sticking with the modern classic: tomatoes, basil, and bread in a light vinaigrette. How we optimize that salad comes down to the way we treat our ingredients.

Dry Bread Versus Stale Bread: Which is Better in Panzanella Salad?

Bread is the focus of the salad, so bread is where my recipe testing started. To begin my testing, I used a very basic panzanella method: I tossed chopped tomatoes, basil, and cubed bread together in a large bowl with salt, pepper, olive oil, and vinegar. Simple and delicious, but not optimal.

Whether you're making bread crumbs, stuffing, or panzanella, most bread-based recipes will call for stale bread. But what does that really mean? Well when it's left sitting out, bread will certainly lose moisture. Drying often goes hand in hand with staling, but the two terms are not synonymous.

Dryingis when bread loses moisture. The basic structure of bread will remain more or less the same, but because moisture provides pliability, the bread will become crisp. Think, toast you've left in the toaster oven a little too long.

In fresh bread, starch molecules are inflated with water, like little water balloons.Stalingoccurs when water molecules migrate out of those starch molecules and into the interstitial spaces within the bread, causing the starch molecules to re-crystallize and form a rigid structure.

Stale bread is tough and leathery, and will become that way regardless of whether moisture actually leaves the loaf entirely. Bread will stale even when it's wrapped in moisture-proof plastic, and as we discovered in Daniel's article on whetherrefrigeration is bad for bread, it stales fastest at cold temperatures, just above the freezing point of water.

So when a recipe calls for "stale bread," what exactly does it mean? Does it meanactuallystale, or simply dry? Or perhaps staleanddry?

To figure this out, I made my basic panzanella salad using the exact same bread (a loaf of ciabatta) stored under four different conditions: