What I'm Eating

Some of you may have heard me wittering on about soup the other day on Wallace’s show, so I thought I’d post this recipe up – pictures to follow of this one as I’ve already eaten all of the last batch. That takes some doing.

Popo pomodoro is a Tuscan bread soup – as well as steak, Tuscans make a lot of bread soups that are designed to use up yesterday’s bread. It’s a great way to find uses for the end of loafs that always seem to be orphaned in the back of the pantry. I must emphasise here that we are talking about artisan bread, rather than leftover bits of pre-sliced supermarket bread.

I have to admit here to a small freezer obsession: I tend to chuck far too many things into the freezer in some vague hope that we might use them, eventually. At the moment, it’s full of grapefruit that will one day get turned into marmalade and about 2kg of Central Otago apricots that I’m going to turn into jam. Honest.

Usually, there’s a few random ends of stale bread. When I get to critical mass, I haul it all out and make up a bowl of this. There are various differnt thoughts on how to make it – some people add the tomatoes to the garlic and then the bread, but I like what frying the bread does to the taste and texture of the soup. You end up with a gorgeous bready, tomatoey, olive-oil-filled bowl of goodness. It burns your tongue if you eat it too fast and it is always silky and pulpy and most unlike stale bread.

It usually makes a tonne – lucky it freezes well.

You’ll need:

- Bread. Stale. Preferably a baguette or a sourdough or a ciabatta.

- Garlic.

- Olive oil. About 3-4 Tbsp.

- Two cans of whole peeled tomatoes.

- 250ml of stock.

Chop the bread into one-inch pieces. Add oil to a heavy-based saucepan and fry up the garlic until it’s just coloured. Add the bread. Watch it suck up the olive oil and marvel. Add more oil if necessary.

When the bread is browned, add the stock. Cook it over a highish heat until all the stock has been sucked up by the bread and the whole mixture is starting to go smushy.

Add the tomatoes. Stir. Maybe add some water if it’s not very wet. Cook for an hour or so until the tomatoes have broken down completely and the whole thing is lovely and tomatoey and rich.

Serve in a deep bowl with another splodge of olive oil and basil (in summer) or parsley.

NB: Don’t be alarmed by the thick layer of sticky bread stuff on the bottom of the pan, it comes off.