Fuck yeah Stale Bread!
One sweet and one savoury way of using up bread that’s gone past its best.
I’ll often have heels of bread leftover and pats of room temperature butter lying around, both desperately waiting to be consumed before they grow mould. I find the best way to use these otherwise ‘destined for the bin’ products up is to mix them together with a little spice, sugar and salt to make the most awesome accompaniment to ice-cream for a weekend treat.
Sweet Stale Bread
Ingredients
- Stale bread (I’m using an old fruit loaf but you can use any sort of bread you’ve got - pittas, bagels, crumpets, sliced pan, sourdough, anything in the bread category!)
- Butter
- Sugar (I’m using an unrefined brown sugar but you can use your sweetener of choice)
- Spice (I’m using ground cinnamon but you can use ground cardamom or whatever spice you like)
- Sea salt
- Raisins/sultanas or whatever dried fruit you like
Method
Turn your oven up to 180 fan.
Slice the bread and then cut into chunks. Place the chunks in a big bowl.
In a saucepan melt butter at medium heat. I’m using 40g. Use as much as you think you’ll need to cover all the bread you have.
Then add the same amount of sugar to butter, 2 heaped tsp of ground spice, 1 heaped tsp of sea salt and stir until you’ve got a wonderful brown sugary sauce.
Take off the heat, stir thoroughly through your bread chunks, add in some dried fruit if you’d like to, stir again and then pour the mixture out onto a baking sheet and bake for 15-20 minutes until the chunks are golden brown.
Serve hot or cold with vanilla ice-cream or mix it through your morning granola or bircher bowls.
Savoury Stale Bread
I hate waste but inevitably, no matter how hard I try there are always the remnants of herbs past their best at the bottom of my fridge, sagging rocket leaves, end of a courgette, leaves from root vegetables I have no use for and so every couple of weeks I like to whizz up everything that’s about to go off in my fridge to make a green, pesto like sauce. Once made, this sauce then keeps in the fridge for weeks and is super through pasta, potatoes, on bread or used on BBQ’d meats.
Ingredients (adjust amounts to your taste as you go)
- Any green leaf, vegetable or herb (including the stalks) in your fridge past its best
- (I used dill, coriander, parsley, rocket, lettuce, courgette, peas, spring onion in my last one but you can use anything at all!)
- A few cloves of garlic
- Hazelnuts or pine nuts or whatever nut you like
- A squeeze of 1 lemon or lime
- Olive oil
- Sea Salt
- Black pepper
- Peanut butter or tahini but these are not essential
Method
Place the garlic and nuts into a food processor and whizz up (I use a nutri-bullet).
Then add the greens with a good few tablespoons of olive oil and whizz up again.
Add the lemon juice, more oil, salt, pepper and peanut butter/tahini and whizz up again to a texture of your liking. You can whizz through more nuts at the end if you like a bite from your sauce.
Spoon into a jar(s) and this will keep for weeks and weeks in the fridge.
To use up your stale bread smear a good bit of this sauce onto each slice and press each slice together into a garlic bread like stick/loaf.
Place in tin foil, loosely wrap and cook for 20 minutes at 180 fan.
Absolutely delicious as part of any meal!