Pancotto Recipe (Tuscan Bread Soup, 45 Minutes)

There are weeks when, for some reason or another, I can’t make it to the grocery store. The fridge may hold a tired bunch of celery and some fresh herbs leftover from a long-consumed dinner, but that’s about it. When you figure out how to make a full meal from assorted jars of condiments, please let me know.

Until then, there’s a solution to those lean times, and it comes from…lean times! Made with stale bread and a handful of aromatic vegetables, pancotto is the kind of soul-warming food that reminds me how satisfying the simplest cooking can be. I make it when the cupboard is bare, or my daughter isn’t feeling well, or I’ve had a horrible day and need a giant bowl of carbs drizzled with olive oil.

What Is Pancotto?

Recipes utilizing stale bread to thicken sauces and soups go back to medieval times. Bread was precious and would never have been wasted, but it was also a convenience food of sorts, a base for dozens of waste-not recipes.

The Tuscan bread soup pancotto means “cooked bread.” Ribollita and acquacotta are similar Italian bread-based soups, sometimes with beans, tomatoes, or greens; this pancotto is minimal by design. The stale bread is a rustic loaf torn into little pieces and simmered in an herb-flecked broth until the bread chunks soften and basically melt into the soup. If you’d love Italian-seasoned Thanksgiving stuffing, pancotto is right up your alley.

The most basic bread soups are made with water, but this one calls for vegetable stock. It gets a huge flavor boost from a sprinkling of Pecorino Romano at the end.

Wait! My Bread Isn’t Stale!

What, you didn’t plan ahead to make desperation soup? You can totally make pancotto with fresh bread. Just dry out the cubed bread on a baking sheet in a 325°F oven for 5 to 10 minutes.

Every loaf will absorb the broth differently, thickening more as it sits. If the soup is too thick for your liking, thin it out with a little water. 

Tuscan Bread Soup Variations

As a classic make-do dish, pancotto is incredibly flexible. I hardly ever make it the same way twice. Clearly you can’t omit the bread, but nearly every other element besides the garlic and onion is fair game.

• Add a can of drained white beans to make the soup even heartier.
• Grate a fresh tomato into the broth, or add canned tomatoes.
• Purée the soup to form a smooth, creamy texture.
• Drop a handful of baby spinach leaves into the soup during the final 5 minutes of simmering.
• Swap the vegetable stock for chicken stock.
• Use Parmesan instead of Pecorino Romano.
• Top each serving with a fried egg.
• Omit the rosemary and finish the soup with chopped fresh basil leaves.

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