Panada experiment

Tonight we decided to try the Panada recipe posted to this blog by Barbaresco. We had a couple of leftover chunks of bread left (one of which was a chunk from a sizable boule-shaped loaf), and their concrete-like texture seemed like it would lend itself well to this recipe. As we had quite a bit of very hard bread left, I roughly doubled the original recipe. I picked up an onion, some mushrooms and some mild Italian sausage at the store. After giving the onion a quick chop (the mushrooms were already sliced), I sautéed everything together for about 10 minutes. In this time, I tried to deal with the bread. Given the aforementioned concrete-like nature of the bread, cutting it with a kitchen knife wasn’t an option. As I’m afraid I’m rather lacking in saws of any kind, and a hammer would have just made a mess, the sautée bread in butter step was skipped. Instead, I just soaked the bread in chicken broth for about 10 minutes, until it started to break down, and then added all of that to the pot. After cooking that down another 20-25 minutes, we yanked out the food processor and gave the soup a quick spin in that before returning it to the heat. The end result was a thick, earthy soup with a nice balance of the sausage and the mushrooms. The fresh, hot croutons on top added a nice crunch and saltiness to the soup. Chris and I both agree that this is something we’ll definitely be making again in the future.