Good morning and welcome to Vittles! Today, we are publishing our Big Salad Summer Recipe Supplement, comprising four recipes for main course salads by some of our favourite cooks. Here, Nick Bramham offers a supercharged version of panzanella inspired by dipping foccacia into pan juices from roasting chicken with ‘nduja at Quality Wines, where he is head chef. To read the rest of the Summer Recipe Supplement, please click below:
All the articles in the Big Salad Summer Recipe Supplement are paywalled. To view them, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year. Your subscriptions help to pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.
Panzanella is a rustic Tuscan salad that makes canny use of the summer’s glut of ripe tomatoes while also rescuing stale old bread. It generally also includes onions of some kind and usually cucumber, salad leaves and fresh herbs.
As far as salads go, panzanella is gutsy and robust. The bread soaks up the tomato juices and vinegar like a sponge, transforming into one of the food world’s great textures: crisp-gone-soft (I think also of Cantonese sweet and sour pork balls; a duck-fat roast potato smothered with gravy; rouille-smeared croutons slowly dissolving into bouillabaisse). This version takes the spirit of panzanella further and transforms it from a side salad or antipasto into something bigger. It was born one night at the restaurant where we had been roasting chickens in ’nduja butter. After serving the dish, I couldn’t resist dragging a piece of focaccia through the juices left in the roasting tray. It was like the best crouton I’d ever tasted. I knew it had to feature in a dish in its own right.
I like to use a hearty white bread, which I tear into craggy uneven chunks and toast in the oven (tearing rather than cutting provides lots of surface area to get crispy and frazzled and interesting). While the bread is in the oven, I fry a couple of chicken thighs to render out all the fat and get the skin super crisp and golden. Then, when the chicken is resting, I melt a big dollop of ’nduja in the same pan and toss the croutons in the resulting incarnadine pool of smoky, spicy roast chicken and cured pork drippings. If you’re thinking I’ve perhaps gone too far at this point, fear not: the raw bite of the onion, the clean snap of the cucumber, and the fresh crunch of baby gem lettuce hearts balance it all out beautifully.
