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Serves
4
Creator Notes
Pancotto (“cooked bread”) is a sizable example of Italian cucina povera, made with a vegetable, its cooking liquid, and mature bread, flavored with garlic and chili pepper and enriched by extra virgin olive oil. I’ve had many variations in restaurants in Campania and Puglia, but the very handiest version is from Berardino Lombardo’s Agriturismo Il Contadino in Caianello, between Rome and Naples. Most pancotto is tender, but Berardino’s has a crispy exterior. Cooking the bread cubes in hundreds of further virgin olive oil at the starting and evaporating the vegetable broth at the stay in narrate that bread and vegetable brown is what makes Berardino’s pancotto so special. A finest non-stick pan is essential to be triumphant with this dish. —Faith Willinger
Test Kitchen Notes
For extra on this recipe and its (wonderful) origins, judge the tubby article. —The Editors
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Test Kitchen-Permitted
Substances
1 pound
turnip greens, broccoli rabe, or wild greens
1/2 cup
handiest-quality extra virgin olive oil (you realize what I imply), and extra to drizzle
4 tablespoons
inaccurate sea salt
2
garlic cloves, peeled
1
dried chili pepper, minimize in half of
4 cups
cubed (1/2” cubes) mature bread (bread has to be rustic, water basically based, not stout-enriched)-
Low and elegant sea salt, to fashion
Instructions
- Bring a dapper pot with at the very least 4 quarts of water to a rolling boil. While wanting forward to the water to boil neat the greens, laying aside not easy stems that can’t ever turn out to be tender. Add 4 tablespoons inaccurate sea salt to the boiling water, add greens, and put together dinner for five minutes or till tender—a central leaf rib will seemingly be tender when pinched. Steal away greens to a colander, frigid beneath running frigid water, squeeze out excess water, and coarsely gash. That is also done in advance. Effect the cooking water.
- Bring the cooking water to a boil. Heat 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil in a dapper skillet, add garlic and chili pepper and sauté till garlic barely begins to brown. Steal away garlic and chili pepper from oil, add the bread cubes add put together dinner till they barely commence to paint. Add the chopped greens, combine effectively, add 1 cup cooking water, and sauté over absolute most life like heat till bread absorbs the liquid.
- Add extra reserved cooking water, 1/2 cup at a time, till cubes commence to interrupt up but is just not a puree. When all liquid has evaporated, the pancotto will commence to brown and likewise you’ll hear the bread scorching. Listen. This step makes the total incompatibility. Traipse every immediate time to erratically brown the bread. Or flip within the occasion you may per chance per chance per chance presumably presumably. Back with a drizzle of further virgin olive oil.
Faith Heller Willinger is a born-every other time Italian. She moved to Italy over 40 years within the past to be taught all about Italian food and wine, studied with skilled cooks and residential cooks, traveled the succor roads looking out out for to search out artisans who hand-craft the most convenient products, put together the most convenient food, invent the most convenient wine. She needs her readers to fashion all of it.
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