3 uses for Stale Bread: Mastering leftovers
I’ve always been a great fan of reusing food you thought you were going to throw away. Bread is one of those things. There’s many countries where you can buy cheap bread that tastes incredibly, so whenever it gets old, you won’t be using it because it’s not worth it. We can buy baguettes here for less than 0,30€! I mean, that’s crazy. If I was going to make them, the ingredients and electricity would cost more.
But stale bread makes some great recipes that fresh bread can’t. So, if like me you end up one day with 5 different types of bread that you couldn’t eat fresh, here are three quick and easy uses (to which I’ll add the obvious and easiest one: Breadcrumbs)
Croutons
Croutons can be done in a variety of ways. Just by cutting them in squares of your desired size and tossing them with olive oil to put them in the oven until they are crunchy. Another great way is coating them with an egg and milk wash and then dipping in sesame seeds before deep frying. For the photo I used them for a cream of tomato. You can definitely eat them as a snack, toss them in salads or use for dipping in hummus, tzaziki or whatever you like the most. Do you use croutons in a different kind of recipe? Please, let me know. I’ll be glad to add it to my everyday meals. By the way, the word croutons in Spanish is picatostes, which is one of my favourite words 🙂
French Toast
The most complicated of the three, but it takes minutes to make a delicious french toast and you can tweak it and make a genuine delicious recipe by adding a different topping.
Ingredients:
1 egg
1/2 glass of milk
5 not too thin/not too thick toasts
Sugar
Lime and Orange
Method:
Beat the eggs and the milk together. Submerge the toasts and wait until they are completely soaked.
Add olive oil to a pan (or any vegetable oil you want, although butter makes richer French Toast, my grandma has always made them in oil) and fry. I never deep fry them because I find they get really soggy after a couple of hours (a delicious kind of soggy) so I just add enough oil for them to get done.
Let them on top of kitchen paper to drain excess fat and then add some sugar (granulated is my choice) on top and a tiny bit of lime juice. I ate the orange slices on the side, but you can make a quick orange marmalade with some sugar and put it on top. Berries are always a great choice. Banana, peanut butter and dark chocolate would make a great pre-workout breakfast.
Garlic Soup
My father reminded me of this recipe when I told him I had a lot of stale bread at home. I haven’t made it in ages and it’s probably one of the most comforting recipes for winter.
Ingredients:
6-8 garlic cloves
1 tablespoon of olive oil
4 tablespoons of paprika (I usually go for 2 hot, 2 sweet)
1.5 litres of water
As much stale bread as you want
Salt and pepper
3 tbsp nutritional yeast (not mandatory, but being a vegan dish, it provides you with a lot of vitamins, as well as it gives the dish an amazing flavour)
Method:
Slice the garlic and fry in the oil.
Add the paprika when it starts to get golden, be very careful not to burn the garlic or the paprika.
Keep stirring the paprika and the garlic until they’ve formed a mash with the oil.
Add the bread and then the water.
Once they’ve been cooking for a while and the bread is soft enough, add the rest of the ingredients.
Have Fun and Keep Fooding!