One of the best ways to enjoy tomatoes in the winter.
. A cooked tomato soup, on the other hand, is the kind of thing I'll save for the colder months, when I'm relying on canned tomatoes, since they've already been cooked anyway.Stale, oven-dried, and fresh breads.
For pappa al pomodoro, I was curious to see what the differences were between stale, dried, and fresh bread, so I whipped up three batches, each using one type. Just like with panzanella, dried bread worked better than stale, softening much faster in the tomato liquid. But even more interesting was that fresh bread worked just as well as dried—which isn't true of a dish like panzanella.
With pappa al pomodoro, though, the goal is to completely reduce the bread to mush, with no crispness at all. The tomatoes alone aren't juicy enough to get you there, so you have to add some more liquid to the pot to fully soften the bread. I typically use afor my extra liquid, but having the bread already fresh just means that you're even closer to the finish line as soon as you start.
The rest is very simple: Simmer a simple tomato sauce in a large saucepan by sweating minced onion and garlic in olive oil, then adding canned tomatoes. I like to crush them by hand to maintain some tomato chunks in the finished soup, but if you want a smoother texture, you can purée them in a blender first instead.