Doesn’t sound great does it? But stale bread, onions, tomatoes, cucumber and basil is a lovely thing.

Wikipedia’s entry on panzanella is pretty sparse, but it is clearly hundreds of years old (panzanella, not Wikipedia)

On a recent trip to Rhodes I tried Dakos salad. It’s a barley rusk that, frankly, you could break a window with, but then it’s topped with tomatoes, onions, feta and oil (at least – often more) which soak into the rusk and make it edible. It’s lovely too and clearly sort of similar.

In fact if you have a look on google there are claims by lots of countries to have invented it or made it specifically theirs – South Africa for example has a recipe that frankly doesn’t look any different from the Italian one.

The Bread

White bread. You can do it with brown, but it’s just not as nice. Everyone is inexplicably in love with sourdough, but I’m buggered if I know why (the clue’s in the name, people)

The original was probably a way to use up stale bread, but drying it out in the oven is OK too. You are not making croutons so you don’t want to get any colour on it, just dry it out a bit.

Some recipes call for the bread to be soaked in water and squeezed, but I think the nicest thing is to make a dressing of oil, basil, salt, pepper and capers (blitzed or finely chopped) and cover the bread in that and leave for about half an hour.

The bread is best torn or cubed into roughly mouthful-sized pieces.

The Salad

Wiki says that this was originally an onion salad and only became a tomato salad in the twentieth century. That may or may not be true, but what you put on it is really up to you. I personally think its base is tomatoes, onions, cucumber and basil, but you can put anything in it really.

Making it for myself alone I’d add olives, capers and good anchovies.

Herbs

It’s not a salad I’d add leaves to, although a bit of rocket would be nice I suppose.

Chopped basil is standard, but anything you lie would work. The bread is already flavoured with basil so it makes sense, but parsley would be nice too. It’s really up to you but in this version I’m using basil

The Dressing

I make a pretty standard salad dressing with vinegar and oil, mustard, garlic and herbs.

But I like to add anchovies so when you look at the method below you’ll see that I crush the garlic, anchovies and some of the basil together as the base for the dressing and add them into the salad itself.

Both times I’ve made this recently we’ve eaten it with chicken. The first was poached breast and the second I cut pockets in the breasts and stuffed them with red pesto.

But anything you like – fish for example – would go, or you can just have it on its own.

Method

Add one whole packet of fresh basil, crushed garlic and chopped capers in a blender and blitz with the olive oil. Cover the bread in it and leave aside. Add more oil at this stage if you feel it isn’t going far enough – the bread soaks it up differently each time.

For the salad dressing, crush a clove of garlic with salt on a chopping board using the flat of your knife. When it’s fairly smooth add a couple of anchovies and crush it more to get a nice paste, then crush a few basil leaves into the mixture. They won’t go to a paste but you’ll be extracting a lot of oil from it speeding up the way the herbs flavour the dressing,

Chop the capers and the rest of the basil.

Put the crushed mixture, the capers and a tablespoon of the basil in a jar with the vinegar. Put the lid on and give it a shake.

Leave it for a few minutes shaking it a couple of times, then add the oil>

Prepare the salad how you like it, but I do it like this:

finely slice the onion/shallot and place in a bowl

seed and chop the cucumber into little cubes and add them to the onion.

slice or chop the tomatoes how you like them and add them to the bowl too. Give everything a mix up and sprinkle the salt on to it. Mix it up again and leave it for about 20 minutes

There’s no great mystery here. Just mix everything together: Dress the salad vegetables, mix in the other ingredients, then mix in the bread.

That’s it!

Ingredients

• Bread. Up to you how much I guess, but one nice thick slice per person torn or cut into cubes
• A bunch of basil (one packet in a UK supermarket)
• A handful of chopped capers
• A nice glug of good oil. 100ml or so

• A large red onion or the same amount of shallot, finely sliced
• half a cucumber, seeded and chopped
• 4 large tomatoes, seeded and chopped or small tomatoes halved, seeds left in
• 1 tsp salt
• A handful of olives, halved or sliced
• A handful of capers, rinsed
• Nice anchovies. You can’t have too many in my view
• Another bunch of basil, chopped

• 1 clove garlic
• 2 achovies
• I tablespoon chopped basil
• 1/2 tsp salt to crush
• 100ml good vinegar (I use sherry but cider or wine are great too. You could use balsamic, but I don’t think the sweetness works that well)
• 200ml good oil. Olive is the obvious, but other cold-pressed oils such as rape or avocado can work well too)