Recipe: Shoulder-Season Fresh Tomato Panade

Summer forever

Baking bread skillfully requires lots and lots of practice, and many of us don’t bake often enough to improve our skills at the rate we’d like, because we don’t eat as much bread as that would undoubtedly produce. But—aside from giving it away to friends and neighbors, something I also encourage—there is a solution to this conundrum: let that bread go stale, and use it elsewhere.

Old bread is such a useful and versatile ingredient for other dishes that it’s the perfect excuse to bake more bread than you can consume while at the pinnacle of freshness. For this reason, there will be a handful of my favorite old-bread recipes in Breaducation, including a few for panade, of which I have gushed about at length here already:

A panade—related to but not the same as that other panade, those milk-soaked breadcrumbs used to bind and moisten dishes such as meatballs and meatloaf—is a French dish using old bread that is soup, stew, gratin, stuffing, and pudding all at once, and yet also so much more than any of those dishes. It’s also the best use for leftover crusty bread there is, and an excellent reason for saving the remnants of every loaf. Best of all, it works with old bread of any vintage, from day old to months old, dried out to rock hard.

The archetypal panade is an all-onion one, and is, according to Richard Olney, “surely the ancestor and still the best of all the onion soups” (Simple French Food, p. 266). Imagine French onion soup, but with loads more bread, sliced or torn into chunks, tossed together with the caramelized onions and Gruyère and/or Parmesan cheese. The dish contains so much bread, in fact, that practically no liquid remains free-flowing. It’s cooked so gently and for so long that the starches in the bread dissolve completely into the surrounding liquid, leaving behind a quivering, gelatinous matrix so delicate it melts in the mouth. (Those liberated starches, meanwhile, help to stabilize the milk proteins in the cheeses, skirting the risk of curdling and allowing the cheese to diffuse completely throughout the dish.) Unless you’ve already eaten panade, this is a texture of bread you have never experienced before, I promise you, and it is wonderful.

Back when I wrote that, I shared a recipe for “pizza” panade, a tomato-and-mozzarella version that is essentially pizza in casserole form. But the thing about panade is that it can easily skew both ways depending upon the amount of liquid you add to the pot—thick and scoop-able, like bread pudding minus the eggs, or brothy, like French onion soup but with loads more bread than usual. Warming and comforting, panade is really a cold-weather dish, but it makes an excellent shoulder-season meal too, when evening temperatures drop while farmer’s markets and backyard gardens remain flush with summer’s bounty.

This version is meant to capture some of that bounty, using juicy, fat tomatoes and fresh herbs, and it skews soupy, though the pectin from the tomato seeds—along with the starches liberated from the bread—gives the broth a meaty gelatinousness. Unlike with the pizza panade, I like to cook this one covered the entire time, so that the liquid does not reduce and the bread remains yielding throughout. The tomato pieces should soften fully, but remain mostly intact, their juices lending the broth some of their color.

Honestly, once you get the gist of panade, a recipe is unnecessary, since nearly any of the ingredients—salt aside—here can be used in variable amounts and it will still be aces, but here’s a basic model to follow your first few outings.

(Incidentally, if you put up summer tomatoes in mason jars, you can make this recipe all winter long, using a quart jar or so, juices and all.)

—Andrew

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Shoulder-Season Fresh Tomato Panade

Serves 4 to 6

• This recipe will work with day-old, stale or months-old, rock hard bread cubes. (If you are saving up old bread to use in panade, be sure to chunk it up while still pliable.) 

• The amount of old bread here is given in rough volume amounts, because its weight will vary depending upon vintage. The simplest way to determine how much to use is to lay the pieces into the empty Dutch oven and use as much as it takes to fill it with a single, not-too-crowded layer.

• Ditto for the tomatoes, which should fill the empty pot in a slightly more-crowded layer, since they will lose volume as they cook and release their moisture.

• The age of the bread will determine the total amount of water needed.
  
  

Panade

6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided

8 medium garlic cloves, peeled and lightly crushed

1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1 small yellow onion (~100g), finely chopped

7g (1-1/4 teaspoons fine) salt

6 to 8 cups old bread, torn or cut into 1- to 2-inch hunks

900g (2 pounds) juicy summer tomatoes, cored and cut into hefty wedges

10g fresh basil leaves

2g fresh oregano, chopped

750 to 1250ml (3 to 5 cups) water, divided

To serve

extra-virgin olive oil

finely-grated Parmesan or Pecorino Romano cheese

freshly-ground black pepper

fresh basil leaves, ribboned

1. Panade: Set an oven rack to the lower-middle position and heat the oven to 325˚F (160˚C).

2. Heat the garlic cloves and 3 tablespoons olive oil over medium heat and cook, stirring regularly, until the cloves are lightly browned on all sides. Add the red pepper flakes and cook for 30 seconds, stirring constantly. Add the onion and salt, and cook, stirring regularly, until the onion is translucent and softened, 4 to 6 minutes.

3. Remove the pot from the heat and add the bread, tomatoes, and herbs, and stir gently until everything is combined. Using a spatula or tongs, rearrange the bread and tomatoes until uniformly distributed. Add enough water to just cover everything completely, followed by the remaining 3 tablespoons olive oil. Bring to a simmer over medium-high heat, adding water as needed to keep everything barely submerged, then cover and transfer to the oven.

4. Cook for 45 minutes, then check the liquid level in the pot, adding more if needed to leave the bread mostly submerged. Cover, return to the oven, and cook until the bread is gelatinous and soft throughout, at least 45 minutes longer. (The panade can be held in a 200˚F (90˚C) oven for up to an hour before serving.)

5. To serve: If needed, add boiling water to thin the panade to a brothy consistency, swirling the pot gently to even out the texture and seasoning of the liquid. Ladle into shallow bowls, drizzle with olive oil, top with cheese, black pepper, and basil, and serve.

Tomatoes in pot; mixture brought to simmer on stovetop; finished panade before serving.