How to Choose Bread for Italian Panzanella

Video Transcript

"The first step in making your Italian Panzanella Salad is to start off with your bread. You want to make sure that your oven is set to 400 degrees. We are going to toast the bread and get out all that moisture from that bread. So if you have stale bread or old bread, that is good bread to use for this dish. What we are going to do is I've got a really great loaf of sour dough here. I am just going to cut it in half so it is a little bit easier for me to work with. I am going to cut good size chunks of this sour dough bread here. And this is kind of a rustic salad. It is really kind of what you have on hand. If you don't have sour dough, then you can use Ciabatta, you can use pekosa, white bread, wheat bread really anything that is white. Alright we've got that going and we are going to cut it into chunks here. Again, the sizes doesn't have to be the same. They are going to shrink up a little bit when they bake. I am going to place them on my sheet pan and use the other piece of my pekosa bread. I like to use the bread knife when I cut the bread because it has a serrated blade and it makes it easier to cut through and saw through the bread instead of just pushing it down like you would with a chef's knife. And now we are going to cut the other half of the French Sour Dough bread. The part of the purpose of the salad is we are going to dry out all the moisture from the bread and what we are going to do is replace that moisture with the dressing and the bread is going to soak up the flavor of the bread and give it a really nice flavor. So it will be kind of soft and a little flavor burst of dressing as we take a bite into it with the rest of your salad. Okay now our bread is all nice and sliced. "