What do you do with old bread? For many chefs and bosses who I worked for, I needed to just threw them away. It really "grinded" my gears because of the waste factor, plus the many great ideas and dishes they were losing out on.
For example, one can make butter-fried bread cubes flavored with, amongst other things, pepper, or parmesan cheese. This snack could have been handed out for free to paying customers. They did not do this.
But the best thing, in my opinion, to do with old bread is to make bread crumbs! I love doing this as I use bread crumbs in various dishes. That is if there is enough bread left over! But being a baker, I always bake too much bread.
Please follow along with me in this post to see how I make bread crumbs, in effect reducing, reusing, and recycling food! I will also show you one way how I use these bread crumbs in my cooking.
Old bread is a real problem we humans are sitting with. As mentioned, the bakeries I worked in just throw away the old bread. Not to even talk about the inhumane practice of throwing away food that could have been eaten by even the workers in the kitchen, people are also missing the opportunities to make awesome new dishes with it.
I love making bread cubes fried in some butter which you can then cover with all sorts of spices. My favorite is either just pepper or parmesan cheese. In a previous post, I showed you how I play with textures in which I use the crunchy effect of bread cubes to contrast with the soft avocado.
The point being, when you just throw away food, you are in effect throwing away ingredients to a potentially new dish.
There is only one ingredient: stale and old bread. Before going into the recipe, the ingredient might be changed into "dried bread".
Ideally, you will need to dehydrate the bread completely, either in a dehydrator, using the sun, or in an oven.
There are easier ways to do this. A food processor is the answer. I am crazy, so I used my mortar and pestle to make bread crumbs.
I then crush them:
And then I crush them finer:
The step you should not skip, in my opinion, is to separate the sizes of breadcrumbs. There will be a fine powder, a medium-sized particle one, and then the crumbs that are too big. I usually just regrind them. Again, a food processor would have been easier.
If you are crazy like me, which I hope is not the case, you will want to get a tub or something to catch the flying pieces of bread when you pound them.
In any case, you will want to have a setup like this to separate the varying sizes:
In the end, you will have two separate holders: one for the bigger pieces, and one for the fine powder.
In a previous post, I showed you how I make, what is to me, the best french toast ever. In that post, I also used bread crumbs I made from old bread. The key ingredient to the best french toast is bread crumbs, believe it or not. The result is a crunchy exterior and soft interior.
As discussed in the linked post, you will want to drench the bread in your batter, and then add the bread crumbs. Shallow fry the pieces that you covered in bread crumbs.
Being extra, add some browned butter and honey to take them even further.
I hope that you learned something from this post! Go out and reuse, reduce, and recycle, even in your culinary world. It will really ask of you to rethink the way you see food but it will help you to create yummy new dishes.
All of the photographs are my own, taken with my iPhone, and the musings and recipe are my own unless stated otherwise, or hyperlinked. Happy cooking and stay well.
