I hate wasting bread. But I’m not really excited about eating dry, hard, too-old bread, either. Now, fresh bread can be frozen and defrosted pretty effectively (defrost on a rack, or, if you froze it sliced, give separated slices a very short time in the toaster oven on low heat), but sometimes even doing that, we end up with a lot of unused bread pieces waiting in the freezer.
Fortunately, lots of people hate wasting leftover bread, and have figured out wonderful things to do with it that don’t involve composting. I’m going to present a few of the ways we use leftover bread, with photos (mine, not food stylists’). I’ve written out a few of the recipes; for each of the others there is a brief description, and link to the detailed recipes elsewhere to avoid the tl;dr problem. (I promise I am not getting paid for links to my own blogs — if you see an ad, it’s Wordpress getting paid for hosting freebies.)
Panzanella: bread salad — three versions — easy and delicious!
(see Photo above for recipe #1)
We have learned that this is how the Italians use up their bread. Fundamentally, it involves toasting or grilling bread that is at least a day old, (or we’ve just used the really old, dried bread as it is), then tossing it with other ingredients (veggies) and dressing. Panzanellas are excellent accompaniments to meat main dishes, but they’re also substantial enough to be a light meal in themselves.
I expect there are as many ways to do panzanella as there are cooks in Italy. Recipes lean towards sturdier, country breads, rather than delicate white ones. Most use tomatoes, so are summery, but our newest discovery (#3) does not.
1. Simple panzanella with tomatoes: This is simply dried/grilled bread, tomatoes, onion or shallot, and basil, in a red wine/Dijon vinaigrette (as pictured at the top). It wasn’t till after we’d tried #s 2 & 3 below that Mr pixxer decided he wanted to try a more traditional version like this one. It was terrific! There are countless recipes online for panzanella with tomatoes. In the version below, I read Mr pixxer a few suggestions from this link, especially the ratio of salt to tomatoes, and he took it from there. Note that the proportions here are not necessarily the same as in the linked recipe. This tells you a lot about the resilience of panzanella.
Traditional panzanella with tomatoes:
For two good-sized servings, this is what Mr pixxer did:
Chop about ½ lb of tomatoes into bite-sized pieces, and place in a colander, over a bowl to collect the tomato juice that they shed. Sprinkle 1/3 tsp salt over the tomatoes. Toss thoroughly, and let sit for at least 15 minutes.
Chop up a pile of dry bread. Might have been as much as 2 cups? The linked recipe oils and toasts the bread, but since it was totally dry, we just used it “as is” this time.
Thinly slice a small bit of shallot (1-2 Tbsp or so? ), and tear or chop into large pieces perhaps ¼ cup of basil leaves. More doesn’t hurt.
Mix the tomato juices with olive oil — perhaps 3-4 Tbsp — and ¼ as much red wine vinegar — so, something like 1 Tbsp, 1 tsp Dijon mustard, and some freshly ground black pepper. Perhaps 20-30 minutes before serving, toss the tomatoes, basil, shallot, and bread with the dressing.
Here is a very beautiful and useful blog post about “regular” panzanella
2. Panzanella with grilled eggplant:
I first discovered panzanella in Weber’s Big Book of Grilling. This recipe is rather unusual, in that it contains eggplant. Being from Weber, it requires grilling both the bread, to give it a nice toasting and a good flavor, and also the eggplant. The salad is tossed in a balsamic vinaigrette. Good to have the bread in slices rather than small cubes for the grilling step! PLUS — you brush both the bread and the eggplant slices with balsamic vinaigrette before grilling them. The remaining ingredients are just tomatoes and fresh basil, and a balsamic vinaigrette. I LOVE this dish! Weber presents it as an accompaniment to lamb rib chops (a different lamb chop can be seen in the photo), which are marinated in some of the vinaigrette, but we’d have it as a main dish :).
Instead of making this WFD impossibly long, I’ve linked the detailed recipe on my recipe blog.
3. Panzanella without tomatoes (panzanella senza pomodoro):
A new discovery!! In searching the web for panzanella, we ran across the fact that Italians often make this without tomatoes, which had never occurred to us. We tried out a recipe from a video and wow, it was fantastic! The only issue might be finding “portulaca,” which translates to “purslane,” and which we had never had. Wiki says Italians think it purslane is a food and Americans think it’s a weed — but one of the farmers at our Saturday market thinks it’s food, and we passed their booth and lunged at the purslane and fell in love with the taste immediately. I had previously found a nifty place to buy the seeds online, and so we have those, too.
And in the time since I originally drafted this portion of the blog post, we found purslane at our closing (ack!) OSH store, so I can show you what it looks like (not that google couldn’t do as well, or likely better).
This recipe asks for unsalted bread (the regions of Italy have their own special breads, some of which have no salt, which is to say, not all Italian food is fantastic...) but if your bread has salt, you soak it in water, then drain and add vinegar. Not sure what this does, but it sure comes out well! Do it, salted bread or no :) The rest of the recipe is purslane leaves, basil, a bit of onion, and arugula, with olive oil. The video recipe also includes cucumber, which we didn’t have — but you’re getting the idea here… add it sometimes, add other stuff — what have you got?
Panzanella senza pomodoro
(for two)
For the salad pictured up there under the “3’ “we used about ½ cup purslane leaves, a handful of baby arugula, some chopped red onion (the sweeter the onion the better), 15 or so modest-sized basil leaves, cut in strips, and, of course, bread: The four slices of sturdy bread were sprinkled with water and red wine vinegar, and let sit for a shirt while. They are supposed to be squeezed, but Mr pixxer added little enough liquid that mostly nothing squeezed out. He tore up the bread, tossed it in with the rest of the ingredients, and added a generous amount of olive oil (see the video linked below — yikes). I didn’t write down any salt or pepper, but you can see if you’d like to add them to taste.
[I’m linking that video in case anyone speaks Italian, but even Mr pixxer, who is decent at it, had trouble with the host’s rapid speech! But you can watch what the chef is doing.]
Asparagus Bread Pudding
“Bread pudding” is an obvious answer for using up dried bread, but most bread puddings are sweet and cinnamony custards. Great stuff! This one, which I wrote up in a previous WFD, is savory. It
tends to be a once-a-year treat at the pixxer house b/c frankly it’s something of a pain in the neck to make (only b/c of cleaning all the herbs!), but it’s a to-die-for taste. Team up :) The recipe is from Georgeanne Brennan's Potager, which wins the “highest percentage of recipes cooked” award in the pixxer house.
Here’s a link to the detailed recipe.
The recipe uses slices of dry bread; asparagus; Romano, Fontina and Swiss cheeses; a custard made of eggs and milk, and 1/2 cup of chopped herbs. They suggest chives/parsley/tarragon or sage/thyme/marjoram, both of which combinations are terrific. The barely-steamed asparagus is layered in with milk-soaked bread, the cheese mixture, and the herb mixture, and the custard mix is poured over the top, and the whole thing is baked.
Bitter greens with milk-soaked croutons
To me, this is a super luxury — the croutons are To Die For — but I’m guessing that its provenance is “using stuff up.”
This recipe comes from Simple Italian Snacks, from the now-gone (sniff) hole-in-the-wall restaurant called ‘ino in Manhattan. That’s a link to the publisher, but I’m sure you can get the book cheaper elsewhere — authors are Denton and Kellinger.
Wilted Escarole/Endive with Milk-Soaked Croutons
(Recipe serves 4)
Milk-soaked croutons:
Place 1 stale ciabatta loaf, cut into 1 1/2” cubes, into a shallow bowl, and add milk to cover them (3 cups?). Let the bread soak for an hour to absorb the milk.
Preheat the oven to 400F.
Drain the bread cubes, squeezing them to remove any excess liquid. (Use clean hands or equipment, and use any extra milk for a pudding or scrambled eggs :) Spread the bread cubes in a single layer on a baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil, and toast in the oven, shaking the baking sheet occasionally (you might have to scrape them up the turn them over with a spatula) until they are gold and crisp, 15 to 17 minutes. You can store any extra in an airtight container at room temperature, but normally I see that none are left over ;)
Endive or escarole:
Remove the dark tips of the leaves from one head escarole OR separate the layers from a four large Belgian endives.
In a large Dutch oven with a tight-fitting lid, heat 3 Tbsp olive oil (one more later… 4 total needed) over a medium flame for 2 minutes. Add either the escarole or the endive, 1 tsp salt, and 3 garlic cloves, sliced. Cover and steam till the veggies are limp — about 5 minutes for escarole (the original recipe), but longer for the endive.
Serve to plates, and top with sliced red onion (about ½ onion?) and drizzle that last Tbsp olive oil over the tops.
{Pumpkin soup with} black pepper croutons
For this recipe, you toss bread chunks in melted butter (I cook them briefly in the pan with the melted butter — perhaps 2 Tbsp for 4 slices of bread?) and toast them in a 350F oven till fairly dark golden brown (up to 15 minutes for fresh bread, shorter for dry, lightning fast in a toaster oven so watch out), then immediately toss with fresh-ground black pepper while they’re still hot. They are an essential garnish for their roasted pumpkin soup — another recipe I wrote up in a previous WFD — but they are most excellent croutons and likely could find many uses, for example, in any tossed salad.
So, What’s For Dinner at your house?
Also: if you’d enjoy posting a diary in this series (every Saturday, 4:30pm PT) contact ninkasi23 by Kosmail or reply to the calendar she will undoubtedly post in the comments.