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The Turquoise Table

Kristin Schell

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in Recipe Collection

Homemade Croutons

crouton5

What do you do with the heel at the ends of the bread loaf?  Honestly? Do you reach right past secretly hoping someone else will use it? Do you try to conceal it from your children by placing it out of sight on the bottom of the sandwich?  Or do you simply toss it?

I don’t know about your household, but around The Schell Cafe no one will voluntarily eat the heel of the bread.  Husband will on occasion, but only as an act of frugality not because the heel is his chosen choice of bread slices.

Rather than torture the Littles by making them eat the heels, I’ve started making homemade croutons.  Which, as it turns out, is a double bonus as they started liking salads when I began garnishing their greens with homemade croutons.

You can get as fancy as you want making croutons.  It’s a great way to use flavored olive oils or tasty combinations of herbs and spices.  If I have just a tiny bit of chives or other herbs leftover, I toss ’em in.  Once you’ve made  your own croutons a few times you’ll start noticing all kinds of extras lying around the kitchen that will serve as great flavor boosters.

Homemade Croutons

Heels of bread loaf or slightly stale slices (anything destined for the trash!)

olive oil

salt

herbs or seasonings to your liking

First, cube the heels of the bread loaves.

crouton1

Next, toss the cubed bread with a splash of olive oil and desired herbs or seasonings.  I just used coarse sea salt for this batch of croutons.

crouton2

Spread the oil bathed croutons on a foil-lined baking sheet.  I use my toaster oven.  No sense heating up the kitchen for such a small task.

crouton3

Bake at 200 for twenty or thirty minutes, until the bread is dried and crunchy!  Store in a baggie or tupperware container for up to a week.

You can also put the croutons in a small food processor and pulse to make bread crumbs. I do this to make the Littles breaded chicken tenders…but I’ll save that for a Kids Cook posting soon.

*** Gluten Free Update: We now use the heels of our Udi’s bread for croutons and breadcrumbs! Freeze until you are ready to make.

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Filed Under: Recipe Collection Tagged With: breadcrumbs, croutons, heel of bread

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Comments

  1. Foodista says

    at

    Sounds great! I also like making my own croutons!

    I’d like to invite you to take some time to drop by at Foodista. We have launched an online food and cooking encyclopedia ala wikipedia where you can contribute and share what you know about food and cooking techniques.

    We also have a small embeddable widget that will help you build traffic from Foodista-related pages. This will explain how the widget works. Thanks

  2. Mrs. Kravitz says

    at

    ahh, much better, more to my liking and ability… and you know i love to pull things out of the trash!!!

  3. kristacooks says

    at

    Yes! I love doing this, but forgot all about it!! I’ll add this to my list to my Make it Myself mantra in 2009!

  4. Reeni says

    at

    This is a great idea, your so clever!! We do save our heels and stale italian and french bread, we freeze it and take it out when we make meatballs.

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I'm on a mission to love my neighbors. I put an ordinary picnic table in my front yard, painted it turquoise and invited neighbors, friends, and even strangers to hang out and do life together at the Turquoise Table®.

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