Bread & Tomato Salad

Name: Bread & Tomato Salad
Yield: Serves 4-6
Cuisine: French
Ingredients: 1 kg ripe tomatoes [such as Love Bites, Romas, Ox Hearts or Black Russians], cored and cut into 2cm pieces; sea salt; 120 g small black olives [such as Ligurian or the tiny wild Australian variety]; 20-40 ml aged red-wine vinegar [such as Forum Cabernet vinegar]; 1 large Lebanese cucumber, cut into 3mm-thick slices; 1 red onion, thinly sliced; 80-100 ml extra virgin olive oil; freshly ground black pepper; 250-300 g Italian-style bread [such as ciabatta], crusts removed; 2 large cloves garlic, any green shoot removed, roughly chopped; 1 bunch basil, leaves picked, large leaves gently torn into smaller pieces

Preparation info

Serves
4-6

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Salades

By Damien Pignolet

Published 2010

About

This Tuscan dish is called panzanella and is correctly made with a type of bread from that region that is made without salt. The bread has a firm crust, fine texture and is very white. It becomes stale and unpalatable after a day or two, making it ideal to use up in this simple peasant salad. A good substitute is ciabatta, but both breads are readily available at Italian food stores. While it should be made from either of the breads I’ve mentioned to be authentic, as the aim is to us