One of the biggest dilemmas I face on most Wednesdays is figuring out a way to make use of bread on the verge of staleness. If I had stocked up on Epis or baguettes at the Farmers’ Market the previous Saturday, I was free of any such quandary because neither of those survived past Sunday morning (if it even lasted that long, at times). It was the gargantuan (the bakers here have got to start selling more human-sized portions!) Campagne or Batard that make it so damn difficult; and end up hard as a rock and useless for anything much in 3-4 days.

But all that came to an end when I rediscovered the fantastic Panzanella. Like many other fabulous dishes that I encountered during my travels-this time in the Tuscan region of Italy; this too I’d forgotten all about; but it took a passing comment I heard fleetingly on some food podcast (could have been NPR’s Food, but not too sure-could have been KCRW’s Good Food as well) to bring back the memory of a simple and yet mind-blowing salad.

Panzanella, as you might decipher from the name, is a sort of bread salad. But the chief ingredient; or at least the one heralded as such, is a ripe, succulent tomato. Chunky bits of a bread loaf in its twilight hours, are torn off with rough abandonment and tossed with pieces of ripe, juicy tomatoes, slivers of red onion, cubes of Mozzarella di Bufala, a chiffonade of basil, red wine vinegar and the best quality olive oil you can get your hands on. Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper top the lot.

Heirloom tomatoes have the added benefit of providing eye candy, so I like using them instead of the regular vine ripened/Roma varieties.

I also like alternating between Balsamic and Red Wine vinegars. These are all mere guidelines according to personal taste, so there’s no ‘rule’, as such. However, it’s important to bear in mind that this isn’t another one of those areas to apply what an Italian chef once called ‘the American condominium mentality’. In other words, less is more. I couldn’t agree more with this chef; after all, if you ever have the misfortune to come across an American sandwich, you will encounter mustard, mayonnaise, lettuce, sprouts, enough folds of cold cuts to feed a small village, tomatoes, pickles, onions, cheese, avocado, and a flurry of other things-all between two slices of bread. The general lamentable attitude is more bang for the buck, which leaves someone with the desire to taste any one ingredient in a combination of several hanging.

Panzanella shouldn’t be over done; most of all, perhaps, the bread shouldn’t be cubed and fried. Likewise, bell peppers, lettuce, capers and Dijon mustard have no place here. The idea is to enjoy a really good tomato and salvage some stale bread.

The original recipe calls for cucumbers as well, but I think this is one of those ‘family recipe’ additions that I don’t feel obligated to include. The reason being, don’t really think cucumbers and olive oil go together very well.

Enjoy the bounty of summer with this fantastic ‘one pot’ salad. Serve along with some hard-boiled eggs and a crisp Rose’; and you’ve got a whole meal.