Panzanella, but make it Southern — and add bacon

Every summer has its own particular mood — a stretch of hot weeks that live in the body as much as the calendar. In mine, there’s always a tomato. Always a moment when the heat is heavy but not unwelcome, when the air feels syrupy and gold, and dinner is less a thing to be cooked than a thing to be assembled. Bread, tomatoes, something cold to drink, and the idea that if you time it just right, you can catch a breeze coming off the porch.

This salad came out of that feeling.

Traditionally, panzanella is a rustic Tuscan salad designed to rescue stale bread by tossing it with peak-season tomatoes, olive oil, and vinegar. It’s thrifty, smart, and impossibly good — a dish that proves you don’t need much more than salt, acid, and time to make something sing. But somewhere along the way, I realized it shared a kind of spiritual lineage with another summer icon: the Southern tomato sandwich. White bread. Juicy tomato slices. Mayo. A heavy hand with the salt. No substitutions, no apologies. Both dishes are humble, sticky, deeply seasonal and full of soul.

So I married them.

This version has toasted bread — crisp on the edges, soft in the middle — salted tomatoes slouching into their juices and a tangy, mayo-based dressing that nods to sandwich logic. There’s bacon, of course. And dill pickles, which might sound rogue, but trust me: they’re the vinegary little high note that brings the whole thing into focus. A few slivers of red onion. A scatter of chopped dill. The result is something that tastes like how a heat wave feels — languid, briny and deeply satisfying.

I think I started chasing this flavor the summer I was 22. I was living in Louisville, Kentucky, just across the river from Indiana, and one sticky evening in late June, my friends and I piled into someone’s pickup and crossed the bridge to the Falls of the Ohio. We brought flashlights to hunt for fossils in the limestone beds, though mostly we just wandered. You don’t swim in the Ohio — not if you’re from there — but being near the water felt like the right kind of relief.

At some point, someone cracked open a cooler in the truck bed and passed around tomato sandwiches: white bread gone a little soft, slices so ripe they bled through the napkins, a thick swipe of mayo and a sprinkle of salt. We ate them with one hand, holding beers in the other, laughing about something I’ve long forgotten.

But that sandwich — I remember that sandwich. I remember the heat on my shoulders, and the light turning blue around the edges, and the way everything felt deliciously cheap and unplanned. That’s the spirit I wanted to bottle in this recipe: the kind of summer meal that doesn’t ask for much and gives back even more.

Let it sit. Let it mingle. Serve it slightly warm or at room temp, preferably outside, with something cold and no reason to hurry.