How To Make you Own Breadcrumbs

Making your own Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are one of the easiest things we can make to help save money in the family budget and it also helps to minimise waste in the kitchen also.

How many times have you thrown out that day old bread?

How often do you race down to the store to buy a packet of commercially produced breadcrumbs to make those hamburger patties, crumb that fish or make your favourite meatloaf?

Far too many times I would imagine.

You can now stop throwing out that day old bread.

You can save the fuel by not racing down to the store just for a packet of breadcrumbs at the same time and here’s how.

I am going to let you know how you can stop both these wastages in your home by a very simple procedure.

Making the breadcrumbs yourself from that day old bread.

You can season the breadcrumbs with herbs, which I will cover for you today also in another posting here. I will also post today for you Multigrain Breadcrumbs which give a most delicious nutty flavour when added to your meatloaves, patties etc.

But for now we will begin with:-

Plain White Breadcrumbs:

Slice your bread if needed in to thin slices. The thinner the slices then the quicker they will process.

Place all your bread slices onto baking racks. You do not want to put them onto trays as there is far too great a risk of the bread slices sweating and that is not what you want here.

The aim is to dry the slices out totally, removing all moisture so we are not wanting moisture to access the slices.

Turn your oven on to 100^oC, or 212^oF, close the door and walk away for a good hour.

After an hour check and see if the bread has dried out totally. You can test this by picking up a slice and tapping it with your finger. If totally dry it will give off a very hollow sound, crunchy even.

If the bread is not quite dry it will give a thud sound rather that a crisp crunch sound. You can also test by breaking a piece in half. It snaps crisply then your bread is indeed dry enough for the next stage.

Turn off your oven. If you are doing this at night you can leave the bread in the cooling oven overnight and continue in the morning. If not the simply remove all the slices from the oven and place them into a large bowl. Cover with a clean tea towel and leave to go completely cold. You can place the bowl in a draftee place to speed this cooling down process up.

When the slices are completely cold break them up and place into a food processor and pulse until you obtain the coarseness that you desire.

I used a mini processor to do mine in this time just to see if it could handle the workload and it did so perfectly.

Once you have processed the dried bread then put it through a sieve. 

This will give you two grades of coarseness – a fine grade and a coarser grade.

I generally put the larger crumbs through the processor a second time as there will always be pieces larger than what you really want as the Photo above demonstrates.

Above is the end result, nice fine evenly textured breadcrumbs. If you desire pure whit breadcrumbs then just remove the crusts from the bread before drying.

Tip:

A full standard loaf of bread will give you approximately 400 grams of finished breadcrumbs; maybe a little more depend on the loaf.

This is all there is to making your breadcrumbs. All that is left to do then is to place the crumbs into an airtight container. 

If you want to store for an extended period of time then you can vacuum pack the crumbs and freeze them to retain their freshness for far longer periods of time.

Otherwise just store the jars in a cool dark place for up to 6 months.

If you do not have a food processor then not a problem at all. This can very easily be done with a clean tea towel and a rolling pin. Just lay the dried bread slices on half a clean tea towel and fold the other half of the tea towel over the top.

Now start moving the rolling pin backwards and forwards on top of the tea towel, until the bread slices have all become crumbs. Put through a sieve as normal, repeat if needed with the larger crumbs and then store in your airtight container.

This is a much slower way to process the crumbs themselves, but it is also much quieter as the food processor is noisy.

Enjoy!

© KB Barnes