pappa al pomodoro

Here's what I love about Italian cuisine: take fresh, simple ingredients, combine them in any number of ways, and you get something incredibly delicious. A great number of Italian dishes have the same basic ingredients - garlic, extra virgin olive oil, tomatoes, basil, etc.

But let's not get confused. Italian cuisine is in no way effortless. There is a certain amount of inherent knowledge required to take your dish from being bread with tomato sauce and cheese to pizza. I've learned a few tricks along the way. First, make sure you ingredients are fresh - and I mean fresh. Secondly, don't try to replace things for healthier options. And lastly, accept the fact that your dish will not taste the same as it did in your favorite trattoria toscana or in any way rival what your host-mother made you.

Yes, I am speaking from experience. Most of this I have learned from trying to re-create one of my favorite all time piatti toscani: pappa al pomodoro. The ingredients are simple: bread, olive oil, tomatoes, garlic, basil. You combine them all, stew them together, and in the end you have this delicious bread and tomato soup that tastes like heaven and is the only thing that could possibly warm you up on an impossibly wet, bone-chilling Florentine winter.


My beautiful friend Katie eating some pappa al pomodoro at my favorite restaurant in Florence, Osteria Santo Spirito.

Since leaving Firenze, I have not succeeded in re-creating this Tuscan classic. Until now, with this recipe. Like I said, it is not exactly the kind you would have in a trattoria in Florence, but it is pretty darn close. The reason this particular dish is so hard to make in the States is because of the bread. Tuscans notoriously do not salt their bread, which is why all those recipes using day-old bread (like pappa al pomodoro and ribollita) work so well; the bread doesn't get too mushy and dissolve completely. With this recipe, the salt in the bread is counteracted by baking it in the oven. The whole thing sets, and with an extra drizzle of EVOO and a quick stir, I was back in my own little paradiso italiano.