Panzanella, but make it Southern — and add bacon

Each summer has its own mood – the extension of the hot weeks that live in the body as much as the calendar. In mines, there are always tomatoes. Always the moment when the heat is heavy but not welcome, when the air feels drink and gold, and dinner is the least thing to be cooking from something that is assembled. breadTomatoes, something DowntownAnd the idea that if you do the right time, you can pick up a breeze that comes out of the balcony.

This authority came out of this feeling.

Traditionally, Banzanella rural Tuscan salad It is designed to save the bread that is meaningless by throwing it with peak tomatoes, olive oil and vinegar. It is smart, smart and impossible – a dish that proves that you do not need more than salt, sour and time to make something sings. But somewhere along the way, I realized that he participated in a kind of spiritual proportions with another summer icon: southern tomato sandwich. White bread. Tomato slices. May. Heavy hand with salt. No alternatives, no apology. Both dishes are modest, sticky, deep in depth and full of spirit.

So she married them.

This version contains toast-fragile bread on the edges, soft in the middle-salted tomato Shatira logic. There is bacon, of course. and DillWhich might look rogue, but trust me: it’s a high note of vinegar that put everything in focus. A few red onion fragments. Scared of chopped dill. The result is something that tastes like what the heat wave feels – weak, vibrant and very satisfactory.

I think I started chasing this flavor in the summer, I was 22 years old. I was living in Luisville, Kentucky, via the river directly from Indiana, and a sticky evening in late June, and my friends and my friends to pick up someone and crossed the bridge to Ohio waterfalls. We brought light bulbs to search for fossils in the limestone family, although we were often wandering. You do not swim in Ohio – not if you are from there – but near the water you felt the right types of comfort.

At some point, someone opened a cooler in the truck’s bed and wandered around tomato sandwiches: a little smooth white bread, mature slices until he bleed through the napkins, a thick wiping of mayonnaise and a spray of salt. We ate them with one hand, and we carry beer in the other, laugh at something I forgot for a long time.

But this sandwich – I remember that sandwich. I remember the heat on my shoulder, the light turns blue around the edges, and the way everything is cheap and unplanned. This is the spirit that I wanted to bottle in this recipe: the type of summer meal that does not ask for much and restores more.

Let her sit. Let it mix. Serve a little warm or at room temperature, preferably outside, with a cold thing and there is no reason for the wheel.