Being Dutch means that I am from a culture where we eat a lot of bread. What I have understood more and more from people who come here from abroad is that they find is strange that Dutchies always eat their bread from the freezer.
Admittingly, that is very true. When I get a loaf of bread, after stealing some slices the first thing that happens is that I dump it in the freezer to take slices out later on in the week. Apparently it doens't go the same in all cultures ;)
What happens with all of these bread in the freezer is that you take out the nice slices and you end up with the 'ends' (we call them the butts of the bread) and those keep piling up.
What to to with all of these ends without letting them go to waste?
Panzanella, the Italian savior for your bread!
In Italy there is a dish made for this exact problem. It is called Panzanella and you can also refer to it as 'poor mans bread salad' because you recyle all of the old bread in there.
Very yummie, and very circular!
Bread is literally the base in there!
So it won't surprise you that when you are making a bread salad that the main ingredient to this is (guess what) bread!
What you want to start with is making a from of croutons from your old bread by sticking them in the over at around 200 degrees Celsius and seriously drizzled with olive oil and pepper and salt. As inspiration I used this recipe by Smaakmenutie for getting the numbers in there.
And I used all old slices I could find and took out the best ones in there (some had caught the freeze in there making them extremely dry and hard, even the dog didn't like them anymore) and I chopped them up into slices of about 2x 2 centimeters and popped them in the oven. They turned out like a sort of croutons and that is cool!
Making the rest
At the same time when the bread was in the oven I took about 5 big tomatoes and diced them into small chunks. Same here, you don't want the fresh ones, you want the overripe ones that are already a bit too far and I go to a local supermarket for that where not a lot of people come to so everything is always old...I kid you not!
Add some salt and hang the chunks in a strainer to collect some tomato fluids which will go as a base for your dressing. With that fluid I also added extra vergine olive oil and some white wine vinegar and pepper in there.
According to the recipe you should add a small sjalot and some garlic, I took like 2 big sjalots and 4 cloves or garlic. Love the stink and you never have too little of this is you ask me ;)
I also took a crapload of basil leaves from my basil plant that was also going in just a little bit too much so I used a LOT of basil. Same here, there is not a thing as too much basil
After adding the dressing to the bread croutons to soak in the fluids, I added the basil and also some chopped cucumber and a mozzarella ball to add this is all together.
Together with some balsamic dressing this was a total winner.
And: old bread used, not such nice tomatoes used versus thrown away, left over basil used before it went bad. Reducing food waste never tasted this good!