Panzanella salad – Italian recipe (VIDEO)

The panzanella salad is a typical Tuscan recipe, made with stale bread, cucumber, onion and tomato, ideal for a hot summer day, since it doesn’t need cooking.

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Hi all of you friends, I’m Sonia. Today we’re outdoors to prepare a fresh summer recipe: the panzanella. This bread salad is a Tuscan main course of peasant origin, made only with ingredients that don’t need cooking, first of all the famous Tuscan bread, that is bread with no salt. But let’s see together what ingredients we’ll need to make the panzanella:

• 4 big slices of Tuscan bread (with no salt)
• 15 leaves of fresh basil
• 1 red onion
• 1 cucumber
• 2 fully ripe tomatoes • salt
• pepper
• extra virgin olive oil
• white-wine vinegar

Well, let’s make together the panzanella:

Begin by cutting the onion into thin slices, and soak it in water with 2 tablespoons of white-wine vinegar; let it stay for at least 2 hours. Dice the tomatoes after removing the inner seeds, and slice the cucumber into thin slices after peeling it. With regard to the bread, remove the crust, and soak it in water with 2 tablespoons of vinegar, without making it soggy. The amount of vinegar to use with onion and bread is subjective: a couple of tablespoons are enough if you want a delicate panzanella, otherwise you can add it to your taste.
Now we can assemble our panzanella, so take a pretty large bowl and start with the bread, that, I remind you, should be Tuscan stale bread. As you can see, it’s moist but not wet. Now crumble it … into not-too-small pieces, then add little by little the onion, the tomatoes, the cucumber and the chopped basil, and dress with oil, salt and pepper. After mixing all the ingredients, keep it covered with cling film in the fridge for at least 1 hour to allow the flavours to blend.
1 hour — fridge
And here is finally our wonderful panzanella. At last, you can drizzle more extra virgin olive oil or white-wine vinegar. From Sonia and Giallozafferano, bye bye and see you next videorecipe.