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Italian Cuisine Expert and Food Blogger
Guido Pedrelli
Guido Pedrelli, the mastermind behind Nonna Box, has honed his culinary expertise for decades, inspired by family feasts in Emilia-Romagna. Mentored by his restaurateur nonna, he mastered Italian classics and furthered his skills with professional culinary studies in desserts and gelato making from Mec3. Today, he shares this rich legacy and authentic recipes through Nonna Box.
Panzanella is a classic day-old bread and vegetable salad from Tuscan peasant cuisine. Despite its humble origins as a way to use stale bread, panzanella has become quite a popular dish and is now even served in fancy restaurants, sometimes with a modern twist.
Panzanella is originally from Tuscany, but it is also prepared in many other Italian regions such as Le Marche, Puglia, Liguria, Umbria, and Lazio. Keep reading to learn how to make a delicious and authentic panzanella salad from scratch with just a few, simple ingredients.
One story of how panzanella was created says that poor farm peasants, who needed to use any and all food available, combined dry old bread with some vegetables they could grow themselves. They moisented the stale bread with water, and enriched it with the seasonal and inexpensive veggies such as tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers to make a quick and filling meal during the summer months.
Another story says that panzanella was invented by local Tuscan fishermen who prepared this basic and simple dish on board their boats by dipping their stale bread in seawater and adding whatever vegetables they could find, namely onions, which have a long shelf life.
The wonderful thing about panzanella is that you don’t need any special equipment to make it!
The best panzanella is usually the simplest. If you grow your own vegetables, you will love the taste of your fresh cucumbers and tomatoes in this simple bread salad. If you don’t grow your own, consider swinging by a farmer’s market so you can pick the juiciest tomatoes and coolest cucumbers. Here is a list of the produce you’ll need:
Panzanella is one of the easiest Italian recipes to make and takes just a few minutes. You start with stale bread, which gets soaked in water and a tablespoon of vinegar. You then squeeze the water out of the bread and crumble it between your hands into a large bowl (photo 1-2).
Then you finely chop tomatoes, cucumber, onions and basil and mix them all together with some extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper to taste and let it “rest” before serving (photo 3-4-5-6).
There are several ways to make your panzanella salad unique. One of the main variations is to leave the bread and vegetables as large chunks when preparing it, so instead of having finely chopped vegetables the salad comes out with large cubes of bread and chunks of tomato, cucumber and onion.
There are also modern panzanella recipes that add fruit, like peaches, or corn, but be sure not to tell the Tuscans as they are quite traditionalist when it comes to their panzanella recipes.
Other easy salad recipes
Expert Tip: You can certainly make panzanella salad ahead of time, like an hour or so before serving, and it will taste even better because the flavors will have time to meld together. If you want to make it the day before, but you don’t want the bread to get too mushy, simply add all the ingredients except the bread, which you can then add 30 minutes or so before serving.
Panzanella can be stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator for about 24 hours, but the bread may become a little too mushy for some people’s taste. If you want to freshen up the dish, you can add some additional bread 30 minutes before serving the next day.
The typical farm bread in Tuscany has no salt, which means it gets stale quickly. The main reason for this, historically, was that farm bread was usually made only once per week and had to last all week without molding. Adding salt to the bread would have attracted moisture, therefore causing the bread to get moldy in just a few days.
Instead, the saltless Tuscan bread doesn’t attract moisture and instead gets stale and hard. But nothing goes to waste in peasant Tuscan cooking, so the hard bread was and is used in many ways, including soaking it in milk with a sprinkle of sugar for breakfast, soaking it in water to make panzanella or adding it to soups like ribollita or pappa al pomodoro.
The origin of the name panzanella is fascinating. Some say that the name panzanella comes from the union of two words, pane, which means bread, and zanella, which means soup bowl or tureen. Others claim it comes from the word panzana, which originally meant gruel or mush.
