Bread is half of Mediterranean cooking, and stale bread might be the more useful half. How to use every slice.
In this kind of cooking, bread is not a side. It is a utensil, a thickener, a base, and on its own a small meal. A good loaf -- crusty, open-crumbed, made with time -- is worth seeking out or learning to bake, and the day it goes stale is the day it becomes most useful of all.
Fresh, it is the vehicle for everything: torn to scoop dips, rubbed with tomato and oil, grilled and topped, dunked into the last of a stew. Buy or bake more than you need and treat the surplus as an ingredient in waiting rather than something on its way to the bin.
Stale, it comes into its own. Blitzed into crumbs, it crowns a gratin or binds a meatball. Torn and toasted, it turns a salad into panzanella or a soup into ribollita, thick enough to eat with a fork. Fried in oil with garlic, it becomes the crunch on top of soups and greens. A loaf that has gone hard is not a loaf that has gone to waste -- it is the start of tomorrow's dinner, and learning to see it that way is one of the quiet pleasures of this table.
