I’ve been making sourdough for years, ever since Keith bought me Tartine, a book about how to make effortlessly extravagant sourdough. Seriously, every person I give a loaf to tells me its the best sourdough they’ve ever had; heaps of praise even when I offer a simple loaf, rather than a specialty one like the olive studded sourdough which is, I’ll blush but admit, mind blowing.

Which leads me to another advantage of sourdough—it seems designed for neighborly sharing. Each batch makes two loaves, and while the bread holds up surprisingly well, it feels downright churlish to keep two loaves when all those people are walking by with arms bare of freshly baked bread.

This is all to say, I’m making a lot of bread and hence, I’m having a lot of leftovers. French toast and bread pudding and stuffing got us through the colder days of sheltering in place, but now, as the sun floats high above and the birds wake us up with their morning songs, my mind turns to panzanella.

If you haven’t had panzanella, it admittedly sounds weird. I mean, bread salad? What’s that about? But if you’ve had it and had it well, I know what just happened when I mentioned panzanella…your tastebuds shivered a little. There’s just something about the crunchy bread giving way to the soft interior, the round olive oil and the bright vinegar, the tang of onions, the juicy tomatoes, and the licorice zest of freshly torn basil.

Dreamy.

Now, it’s hard to give a precise recipe for panzanella, since ingredients vary so much (you might need more olive oil to offset the bite of your vinegar, or your tomatoes may be so juicy you need less of each), but I can tell you that what I learned in Italy seems to be, funnily enough, wrong.

When I walked through the olive groves with my Italian teacher and used halting language to describe my panzanella disaster, he patted my shoulder sympathetically and told me the secret was to used wood-fired bread.

I’ve since learned that’s not strictly true, but it is possible I misunderstood and what he actually said was that I needed to toast the bread. This was, as it turns out, my error on the day of the panzanella disaster that kept me from making bread salad for years. I’d tossed bread cubes into a vinaigrette and somehow expected that to work. Which leads me to the first secret for a beautiful panzanella to dress up your summer table:

Cube your bread, then toss it with olive oil and bake at 350 for about 15 minutes. You don’t want them to be croutons, so don’t let them brown. Just let them get crisp, so they are dry enough to soak up liquid like the good little sponges they are meant to be.
Slice red onions (amount depends on your preference for onions, I use about a quarter of an onion for about half a loaf of sourdough) very thin and then toss with a teaspoon or two of kosher salt and leave them for 10 minutes. This mellows the harsh bitterness from the onion.
Make your vinaigrette using excellent olive oil (the best you have) and red wine vinegar. This is not the time to drizzle on balsamic nor is it the time to benefit from the enzymatic action of apple cider vinegar. You want a nice, soft red wine vinegar. Go easy on the salt since you can adjust later, but do give a good couple of grinds of fresh pepper.
Combine the bread with the vinaigrette and some chopped tomatoes (especially the juice from cutting). Let sit at least ten minutes, but you may need closer to an hour, depending on how dry your bread cubes are. Before serving, taste to correct seasoning and add a handful of torn basil.

Now, people add all sort of extras to their panzanella, and it’s true you can consider it a convince ready to paint with olives and capers and mozzarella balls. But I like it plain so I can really taste those summer flavors.

Buon appetito!