A Hate Piece About Tuscan Bread & A Recipe For Winter Panzanella

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale lo pane altrui

For a region of great food within a country of great food, the bread in Tuscany is awful. Like properly shit. The Toscani’s logic goes that ‘the bread doesn’t need to contain salt because it’s eaten with salty food’. To me that’s like not salting fries cause you’re gonna eat them with a burger. Insane. One good thing they do with that bread though is make panzanella, and it’s good because you add, amongst other things, salt.

There’s a recipe for panzanella further down, but let me just talk about this bread a bit more first. Everyone else in Italy calls it ‘Pane Toscano’, literally ‘Tuscan Bread’. In Tuscany itself they call it ‘Pane Sciocco’ - sciocco meaning ‘without salt’. Wonderfully, sciocco is also a synonym for 'stupid'. Unless you’ve eaten this specific loaf, you’ve probably never eaten unsalted bread, nobody else makes it, and for good reason. Salt plays a few critical roles in the process of bread making, beyond simply making it taste nice. “Will you tell us the critical roles salt plays in bread making Jordon?” Very well.

A Short Explanation of Bread

There are only four things you really need to make bread: flour, water, yeast, and salt. The first three are all pretty self explanatory; flour and water makes the dough and yeast makes the dough rise. Salt makes it all taste nice, yes, but it performs two other critical functions.

The first is that salt kills yeast, or to be less dramatic, acts as a ‘yeast inhibitor’. This means it slows down the process of the yeast breaking down sugars in the dough and allows for much greater control of fermentation, and therefore rising. This sounds counterintuitive - surely you want the bread to rise lots? Yes, but in a controlled manner. Without salt, the yeast goes into overdrive, like shaking up a bottle of soda. The reason that fermentation needs to be slow and steady is because this is what gives dough flavour. The enzymatic activity that happens in this stage is what gives good bread all of its nutty, toasty, caramel flavours once cooked. Generally speaking, that’s why a 48hr fermented sourdough tastes of a lot more than industrial bread which goes from being mixed to baked in a couple of hours.

The second important thing salt does is strengthen the gluten within the dough. We don’t need to go into the chemistry of ions and exactly how this works, but the result of a dough with a stronger gluten network is that it is more elastic and therefore able to more efficiently hold onto the carbon dioxide that’s released when dough ferments. This process is what makes bread rise, become full of air bubbles and be light and delicious.

I found this picture on a baking forum. I’m not sure what happened to the loaf of bread below. I’m not sure if it had no salt, no yeast, or neither of both. I’m not actually sure if it is bread or a cross section of kidney stone.

Bread Legend

So why don’t they add salt to the bread in Tuscany? The legend goes (there’s always a bloody legend) that the bakers in Tuscany created this saltless bread so that they didn’t have to pay a salt tax on it. Cheap breaddy bastards. Despite salt tax not having been a thing for a few centuries, the tradition has continued and to this day, the bread is unsalted. I just love that, the stubbornness of it all. It’s terrible, it’s like eating packing foam, but it’s traditional, so we must continue. So Italian.

The upshot of all of this is that Tuscany is awash with recipes to use up leftover bread. Leftover is the critical word here. They can’t get rid of it. Nobody eats it first time round so there are mountains of the stuff piled out the back of every bakery. The famous Tuscan hills are actually just mountains of horrible bread hidden under grass and Cyprus trees. They even started exporting it to Venice to use as floating ballast for the buildings, but it’s so airless that the city is slowly sinking.

Pane Toscano - I can barely look at it

One of the ways to make it delicious (edible) is to make it into panzanella. The name is a portmanteau of ‘pane’ (bread), and ‘zanella’, the type of bowl it’s served in. In its purest form, panzanella is a simple chopped salad of leftover bread, onions, tomatoes and often cucumbers and basil. The ingredients list screams of summer, but today’s recipe is for a winter panzanella.

Winter Tomatoes?

Winter tomatoes sounds like an oxymoron, and if you walk into a supermarket in April and buy tomatoes it most likely will be. Modern agriculture means that you can walk into any shop in the UK right now and buy tomatoes, but it doesn’t mean that you should. Those pale, watery, flavourless tomatoes grown in giant greenhouses in the Netherlands are a waste of everyone’s time, better to wait for the real thing in summer.

There is an exception to the rule though, there are tomatoes which naturally grow and thrive in the colder months. Varieties like Raf, Camone, Iberiko and Marinda are all grown in coastal regions of Spain and Southern Italy and are at their best right now. I hate writing recipes which are restricted by hard-to-find ingredients, but you will have to do a little more work to find them. Good greengrocers will usually have them, Natoora sell them nationwide and you can get them (via Natoora) through Ocado. If you can’t find them, I’ve got an excellent seasonal substitute which is to use oranges. Remembering that tomatoes are a fruit, and that their job in a panzanella is to provide acidity and liquid to soak into the bread, oranges make a great alternative. This recipe will work just as well with either.

The other two substitutions to make this seasonally suitable are to swap the cucumber, which adds crunch, for fennel, which does the same but has the added bonus that it tastes of fennel. The basil is exchanged for parsley, an idea I’ve taken from Liguria where they makes parsley pesto in winter when basil isn’t growing. The onion, ever reliable, stays the same.

The Recipe

Ingredients (serves 2, doubles easily):

• 4 Large Tomatoes, roughly chopped

• 1/4 Red Onion, thinly sliced

• 1/2 Bulb of fennel, thinly sliced

• 5 2-inch thick slices of baguette, roughly torn

• Handful of Parsley, roughly chopped

• 2 tbsp Olive Oil

• 1/2 tbsp White Wine Vinegar

Method:

Start by chopping the tomatoes into roughly 2 inch chunks, don’t worry about being too neat, just respect the natural shape of them. Put the tomatoes into a small bowl, sprinkle with 1/2tsp of salt, mix well and set aside. This will pull out some of their moisture, make the tomatoes tastier and give us bread soaking liquid.

Finely slice the onion next and put it into a different small bowl and cover with cold water. This brief soak will take out some of that raw oniony bite. Set aside.

Finely slice the fennel. I’m hesitant to tell you to put this in yet another bowl but if you wanted to give it a quick refresh in ice water, you could.

Grab a mixing bowl (last bowl I promise) and slice/tear the baguette into it. Sorry Tuscany, a day old baguette wins here. If your bread is very fresh, you can toast the chunks for a couple of minutes first. I always start with the bread at the bottom so it can soak up the juices as we go.

Pop the tomatoes and all the juice in the bowl on top of the bread, followed by the onion and fennel (drain the onion and fennel but don’t worry about drying, a little residual water is a good thing here).

Give that a mix, then add the parsley, olive oil, vinegar and a nice pinch of salt and mix again. I like to leave it to sit for 5 mins before eating. Perfect as is, but also a great side with a piece of fish.

Enjoy!

“Tu proverai sì come sa di sale lo pane altrui ... You will experience how salty is the others' bread…”

- Dante Alighieri, the Divine Comedy