Bread and garlic soup

I love a lot of simple dishes and one of my current favorites is Spanish bread and garlic soup. There are a lot of variations throughout Spain for this dish and for that matter there is an entire cuisine of Mediterranean food that uses old dried bread as an ingredient. There’s panzanella, the Italian bread and tomato salad, fattoush, the middle eastern salad of stale flat breads, tomatoes, and cucumber, the wide spread use of bread crumbs in pasta dishes in place of cheese (bread crumbs are often referred to as poor man’s cheese, because when they’re fried in olive oil they give a cheese like consistency to pastas). The list goes on. Most Mediterranean countries have several recipes for using dried bread.

The variation of bread soup that I generally make is based loosely upon Teresa Barrenechea’s recipe in her most recent book The Cuisines of Spain, which is one of my favorite Spanish cookbooks. (Her previous book is The Basque Table which is another amazing book that I highly recommend.) What I like about this variation is the addition of a poached egg.

Bread soup is a simple dish that you can make when you have very little in the house. All you need is dried good quality country bread, olive oil, garlic, a pinch of pimenton (smoked sweet Spanish paprika), and a water. Eggs and chopped parsley are optional. I love this so much that, sometimes, I actually buy bread and wait for it to get stale so that I have an excuse to make it. The preparation is simple. Heat the olive oil and 4-6 whole peeled cloves of garlic until the garlic starts to sizzle. Add slices of dried country bread until they start to turn light brown. You may need a fair amount of oil to do this because the bread will soak it up. Once the bread and garlic are browned, ass a pinch of pimenton and immediately add enough water to make it soupy. The bread will soak up a fair amount of water so you may have to add more. Season it with salt and pepper (and a pinch of red pepper if you want but it’s not as traditional). Stir it to break up the pieces of bread and let it simmer for about 15-20 minutes. If you want to add eggs, crack them over the surface of the soup, put the lid on and let the eggs cook until the white are cooked but the yolk is still a little soft. Ladle it into a bowl and your good to go. Sometimes I add a small amount of chopped parsley right at the end, but that’s optional.

It’s simple, frugal and delicious. The bread breaks down into a curd like consistency sort of like a cross between scrambled eggs or cheese. Add a salad on the side and it’s a complete meal. It’s also a great meal for late at night when you may have had a little too much to drink and want something to soak up the alcohol. For such a simple dish, it’s actually very hearty and goes well with a variety of wine and beer. You don’t want something too light with this. Inexpensive, medium bodied, slightly rustic reds are a good choice as would a medium bodied, not too crisp white. Tonight I was actually drinking beer, so I opted to try my latest beer with it which is a Belgian Dubbel, that I brewed a couple of weeks ago. The beer is a little green yet, but I wanted to taste it and it’s a robust enough beer to deal with the deep flavors of garlic and pimenton that bread soup has.

The beer is deep brown and has a fairly moussey head that lasts well. There’s a slight tan to the head, but not as deep as on a porter or stout. This beer was brewed with the Rochefort yeast and has some of the dried fruit (prune and raisin) aromas that Rochefort has. It also has a distinct note of banana and some cocoa notes as well as a touch of spice. The nose will likely come together more as it ages a little bit. The palate is a mix of fruit and malt that is medium bodied but finishes fairly dry. There’s a lingering toffee fruitiness in the finish. The beer tastes young and will get better over the next several weeks, but is very approachable now. The 6.5-7% alcohol isn’t prominent in the flavors. The beer had the deep flavors to work with the soup. It wasn’t an ideal match, but both were rich and deeply flavored and that made it work well enough. The flavors of the Dubbel make me think about grilled beef in a few weeks so we’ll see what e can plan around this beer. In any event, it was an excuse to eat bread soup and try my first tastes of this beer.