Food Network: Grilled Bread Salad

	Print 3x5 Recipe Cards
	Print this recipe out and cut along the dotted lines to add this 3x5 recipe card to your personal collection.

Grilled Bread Salad
Recipe courtesy of The Minimalist Cooks at Home, Mark Bittman, Broadway Books/Random House, 1999

Ingredients
1 small baguette (about 8 ounces) or other crusty
bread
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice (good vinegar also works well)
2 tablespoons diced shallot, scallion, or red onion
1/4 teaspoon minced garlic, optional
1 1/2 pounds tomatoes, chopped
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup or more roughly chopped basil or parsley

Directions

Start a gas or charcoal grill or preheat the broiler;
the rack should be 4 to 6 inches from the heat source. Cut the bread lengthwise
into quarters. Grill or broil the bread, watching carefully and turning as each
side browns and chars slightly; total time will be less than 10 minutes.
While the bread cools, mix together the next five ingredients in a large bowl.
Mash the tomatoes with the back of a fork to release all of their juices. Season
to taste with salt and pepper to taste. Cut the bread into 1/2- to 1-inch cubes
(no larger) and toss it with the dressing.
Let the bread sit for 20 to 30 minutes, tossing occasionally and tasting a piece
every now and then. The salad is at its peak when the bread is fairly soft but
some edges remain crisp, but you can serve it before or after it reaches that
state. When it's ready, stir in the herb and serve.

Ingredients

With MINIMAL Effort
Before grilling rub the bread, with a cut clove of garlic and/or brush it with
some olive oil and a sprinkle of salt.
Add to the salad 1/4 cup chopped olives, 1 tablespoon capers, and/or 2 minced
anchovy fillets.
For a one-dish meal, grill or broil some shrimp or boneless chicken alongside the
bread, then add the chunks to the salad. Or add some leftover or canned tuna (the
Italian kind, packed in olive oil) to the mix.

Directions
Bread salad is a way of making good use of stale
bread. The bread is softened, usually with water, olive oil, lemon juice, or a
combination, then tossed with tomatoes and a variety of seasonings. Like many
old-fashioned preparations created as a way to salvage food before it goes bad

(count pickles and jam among these), bread salad has an appeal of its own. This is
especially true in the summer, when good tomatoes are plentiful and may lead to
the rather unusual problem of waiting around for bread to become stale.
Or, of course, making it stale. I'd always solved this problem by drying bread in
the oven until I realized that using the grill or broiler would not only dry the
bread more quickly but, by charring the edges slightly, add another dimension of
flavor to the salad. This procedure is really the same as making toast--exposing
the bread to direct heat (rather than the indirect heat of the oven) to brown it
as well as dry it. There's another benefit to grilling the bread in order to dry
it out: The added flavor makes it possible to strip the salad to its bare
minimum.
This is a substantial salad, but it's still a side dish unless you're in the mood
for a very light meal. Because it's juicy, almost saucy, and pleasantly acidic,
this salad makes a nice accompaniment to simple grilled meat or poultry, and has a

special affinity for dark fish such as tuna and swordfish.
The only tricks here involve timing. You must watch the bread carefully as you
grill or broil it; a slight char is good, but it's a short step from there to
burned bread. And the time you allow the bread to soften after tossing it with the
seasonings varies some; keep tasting until the texture pleases you. If your
tomatoes are on the dry side, you might add a little extra liquid, in the form of
more olive oil and lemon juice, or a light sprinkling of water.