What is panzanella, and how do you keep it from going soggy?

Panzanella is cucina povera in its most cheerful form: bread too hard to eat on its own, turned into the best thing on the summer table. There is no single correct version, and Tuscan families will tell you so at length.

What it is

The Treccani dictionary describes panzanella as a rustic dish traditional in Tuscany, Umbria, Lazio and Campania: bread, toasted or not, soaked in water, with possible additions such as garlic, onion, raw tomato or anchovies, seasoned with oil, vinegar, salt and herbs. Tuscany's official tourism site, Visit Tuscany, calls it a dish of peasant origins and names its three essentials as stale bread, ripe tomatoes and basil, adding that every family has its own version.

Tomatoes are a relatively late arrival. According to Wikipedia's panzanella article, the dish was based on onions rather than tomatoes until the twentieth century, and a sixteenth-century passage by the painter and poet Bronzino praising onions with oil and vinegar on toast is often read as an early description. The etymology is uncertain, as Treccani notes.

The bread is the whole point

The right bread makes panzanella; the wrong bread makes porridge.

• Use a firm, open-crumbed country loaf, Tuscan-style if you can find it, or any rustic loaf, a few days old. It should be properly hard, not just a bit dry.
• Avoid soft sandwich bread and enriched loaves. They collapse the moment they meet liquid.
• Fresh bread? Tear it into chunks and dry it in a low oven until crisp right through, then let it cool.

Two schools: soaked or toasted

The traditional soak. Visit Tuscany's version covers the stale bread with cold water until it softens, then squeezes it out and crumbles it by hand. The key word is squeeze: press out as much water as you can, firmly, in handfuls. Bread that still drips will make a sodden salad.

The toasted route. Many modern cooks skip the water, tear the bread into chunks, toss it in olive oil and toast it until golden, then let the tomato juices do the soaking. This gives more texture, with soft edges and chewy middles. It is less traditional and very good.

Either way, the bread should end up moist and full of flavour, not wet.

Getting the tomatoes and dressing right

• Salt the tomatoes first. Cut ripe tomatoes into chunks, salt them in a bowl and leave them while you prepare everything else. They release juice, which becomes part of the dressing. This is where the flavour comes from; see picking ripe tomatoes.
• Tame the onion. Slice red onion thinly and soak it briefly in cold water, as Visit Tuscany suggests, to soften its bite.
• Dress generously with olive oil, a modest splash of red wine vinegar, salt and pepper.
• Toss everything, then rest it. Let it sit long enough for the bread to absorb the juices and dressing, tasting as you go. When the bread is tender but still has some shape, eat it. Left for hours, it slumps.

Summer additions

Cucumber, which Visit Tuscany includes, fits naturally. Beyond that, keep it simple and seasonal: capers, olives, celery, a few torn leaves of rocket, or roasted peppers. Basil should be torn in at the end. Traditionalists frown on long lists of extras, and they have a point: panzanella is best when you can still taste the bread and tomatoes.

For other ways to use old loaves, from pappa al pomodoro to breadcrumbs, see using stale bread.