A 'stuffing salad' that highlights everything good about summer tomatoes and stone fruit

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Peach Panzanella

Peach Panzanella

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AKA stuffing salad.

This is my summer stuffing fix. It encapsulates everything that's great about summer produce at its peak season, and bread for the win.

Adapted from Dorie Greenspan

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Ingredients

Half a loaf of stale bread cubes, such as sourdough,
cubed into smaller than bite-sized pieces

3-4 ripe summer tomatoes, your favorite OR
1 basket of ripe summer grape tomatoes

2 ripe peaches or nectarines, any variety, as long as they are ripe and juicy

½ of a red onion, sliced very thinly into strings
Juice of a lemon

Drizzle of olive oil
2-3T of red wine vinegar
Hawaiian or kosher salt, and fresh cracked black pepper
Fresh shredded basil and/or mint, to taste

What To Do

Cube the bread and let it go stale for a couple of days. Alternately, you can also toast them over low heat in the oven.

Cut the tomatoes and peaches into equally sized pieces, about the same size as the bread cubes. Because you are using really ripe fruits, it will be juicy. Dump all of that into a salad bowl and add any excess juice on the cutting board into the salad bowl.

Gently toss the bread cubes into the peaches and tomatoes. Add the onion strings and then the lemon juice. Toss it again and let it sit for about 15 minutes to soften and flavor the bread. Finish seasoning with oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper, in that order. Add fresh herbs, toss once more and serve.

Notes and Talking Story

I adore this Dorie Greenspan recipe for its flexibility and utter simplicity.
I’ve used heirloom tomatoes, good ole’ Early girls, a carton of grape tomatoes from Safeway, doesn’t matter as long as they are ripe.
Skipped the DG step of toasting bread cubes in the oven to make them more crouton-ey, mostly because I'm lazy, but also because simply letting the bread dry out naturally gives that same crouton texture.
The caveat is that I live in a low-humidity climate. Hawaii people and others in high-humidity environs, it's going to be better to toast your bread cubes.
Holds up well at picnics because it doesn’t have mayo and keeps its substance pretty well as a next-day leftover.