WOMAN: People often think that stale bread
is good to go to waste.
But why not use it?
When bread is stale, it is a good time
to turn it into croutons, especially
if you've made it yourself.
There's no reason to waste that bread.
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I'll be presenting two ways of preparing croutons.
One is an oven-dried one.
And the other one is using a pan.
You can use any type of bread to make a crouton.
In front of me, I have some brioche
because you can use very soft breads or some harder breads
like the pain de mie, which is a good standard bread to make
sweet or savory croutons.
I have fresh herbs, butter, oil, salt, and pepper.
So to make the brioche croutons, just cut through the slices.
You need to make them thick.
And I remove the crusts in this case.
But the trick here is that your brioche
needs to be really stale because it's easier to work.
And it has less of the moisture.
I usually cut six pieces out of one slice.
Spread it out on your baking sheet.
I'm going to put a little bit of oil on it,
a small drizzle, little bit of salt. It's just a pinch.
It helps dry out your croutons.
And some freshly milled black pepper.
I'm going to put this into the oven and let it dry.
What I'm doing to these croutons is really
taking out all the hydration it still has in it.
These are nice croutons.
They're nice because they have this golden color.
But they're not overly baked.
They might even be a little white in some centers.
Those croutons are dry.
If you just throw them on the baking sheet,
you'll hear they're kind of like small, little pebbles that
has soaked up a little bit of oil
and has completely dried out with the spices in the oven.
Et voila-- beautiful homemade croutons.
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Another way we can work through croutons is by pan baking them.
I'm going to take the pain de mie for this demonstration.
I'm going to remove the crust as thinly as I can and then do
just as thick slices.
When it comes to croutons of whether you decide
to put them in a pan or dry them in the oven,
it's really discretionary.
For me, it's about the time I have at hand to make them
as well as the types of spices that I
want to bring to the croutons.
I'm just going to use a little bit of oil
to heat up and set my stove to medium.
The advantage of using a pan is that you
can add some fresh herbs to it.
When you put some fresh herbs on croutons
that you're going to dry in your oven,
the herbs also will dry out.
And in that case, there's just no point
in putting fresh herbs.
So the oil is ready.
I'm just going to pour those in.
Toss them around so that they can absorb all the oils.
They're taking the nice, yellowy color of this olive oil here.
If you use butter, the difference
is you'll have a crouton that will tend to brown much faster.
Once they start getting golden, that's
when I would add the fresh herbs.
Now here I just used parsley.
You could use chives.
Try and use herbs that are not too delicate because those will
tend to crumble up too fast.
Here I have a mix of parsley and garlic.
That's-- I have flying garlic, too.
That makes for a very flavorful crouton.
Doesn't call for any extra salt or pepper.
But if you feel like adding some more spice, be my guest.
The smells that are coming out of this
are just mouth-watering.
You have freshness of the herbs.
But you also have the really wonderful and luscious smells
of garlic.
Those are the kind of croutons that you can put on a salad.
But you can also just eat as is as a little nibble.
There's a good sound indication here.
When they start singing a little bit in the pan,
then you know that they're getting on the ready side.
They're not absorbing any oils.
They're browning.
OK, these are ready to go.
They're not perfectly well browned.
And there are some that are a little lighter than others.
But that's fine.
The main thing here is just getting them dried out
and putting them on a piece of paper
to absorb any remaining oil that you have.
And you can add an extra few sprigs of the herbs on them.
These are great to eat as soon as they've cooled down.
They make a perfect afternoon snack.
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