Free food.
That’s how I feel about bread crumbs. Invariably, part of a baguette goes uneaten, and by the next day, it’s stale. It could go into the trash, or it could go into a bowl and wait for more of its baguette brethren to accumulate, until the day comes when the bowl is full and it’s time to make bread crumbs. (Be warned, though: A bowl full of bread scraps sitting on your kitchen counter will attract curious stares from houseguests. Prepare a few pithy replies to potentially awkward questions in advance.)
Homemade bread crumbs are far, far superior to the store-bought kind. Besides being tasty enough to eat straight, they are perfect for:
- breading croquettes, chicken and anything else you want to fry
- mixing with cheese for topping gratins
- stuffing vegetables
- sauteing with olive oil and garlic and sprinkling on top of pasta (aka the poor man’s parmigiano)
- covering bottom crusts of fruit pies to absorb excess juice
Once you’ve collected enough odds and ends of bread, the process is straightforward. Crush the pieces of bread with your hands into crouton-sized pieces onto a baking sheet.
Place the bread in the oven and set for 300 degrees. Once the oven hits 300 degrees, bake for 10 more minutes. Turn the oven off and allow the bread to cool in the oven, about 20 minutes. (You want the bread to develop a little golden color, but you don’t want it to burn. Mostly, you just want it to dry out.)
Transfer some or all of the bread scraps to the food processor (you may have to work in batches). If there are any pieces bigger than a golf ball, crush them as you put them into the food processor. Pulse the food processor a few times until the scraps are ground into crumbs.
Set a colander over a bowl. Pour the contents of the food processor into the colander, then shake the colander so that the crumbs fall into the bowl below.
Take any pieces of bread that stay in the colander and return them to the food processor. Pulse again until ground into crumbs, then add to the rest of the bread crumbs. (You could, I suppose, continue to sift the bread crumbs and pulse the remaining large pieces ad infinitum in a culinary version of Zeno’s paradox, if you were the sort of person with too much time on your hands.)
Place in an airtight container and keep indefinitely in the freezer. Free food!
[...] In the second bowl, crack two eggs and stir them together. In the third bowl, add a bunch of bread crumbs. Take a spoonful of croquette batter (vegetarian croquettes first, please). Drop the batter [...]