I love croutons, but not those pre-made rock-like nuggets covered with artificial flavors and colors that you find in the grocery store. I’ve done plain garlic croutons once before, to go with the pizza soup. (And yes, garlic croutons are “plain” croutons. If you’re not going to at least use some garlic you might as well put some toast on your salad.)
This time I did garlic and herbs. But no salt. Nearly everything needs some salt, but these do okay without it.
Ingredients
garlic bread (see below)
butter
olive oil
parsley, dried flakes
basil, dried flakes
Directions
This fall I plan to start baking my own bread. I haven’t started yet because a) I’m not generally a baker, and b) it’s hot out. If I’m going to be experimenting with the oven, I’d rather do it when I won’t mind having it on half the day. But once I get fast at it, I don’t ever want to buy another pre-made bread that has corn syrup in it. Check yours, if you buy bread. Odds are it’s in there.
Until then, I really like the bread they have at my grocery store. Check out these ingredients.
I can live with that. Their sourdough is great, but for today’s croutons I got the garlic. Nice chunks of garlic throughout the loaf. Really nice.
To start, trim the crust off the bread. I like to stand it on end and trim from top to bottom all the way around, sort of like how you’d peel a cucumber without a vegetable peeler.
Once it’s crustless, cut the bread into bite-sized cubes and melt some butter in a pan, with an equal amount of olive oil.
How much butter? That really depends on how much bread you’re doing. This was about two tablespoons of butter, and two tablespoons of olive oil. Add the bread cubes.
So how big is “bite-sized” anyway? For soup, I like nice big chunks. For salad I like them smaller. Smaller ones get more crunchy, bigger ones can be crispy outside and soft inside.
Toss the bread around to make sure it gets a good coat of butter/olive oil all the way around. If it all gets soaked up and lots of the bread is still dry, push the bread to one side and melt some more butter and olive oil.
Add enough of the herbs to make sure each piece of bread has several bits of the herbs. But you don’t want green croutons. (Unless you do. But that would be strange.)
Once all the bread has a nice coating of butter, olive oil and herbs, transfer to a baking pan, large enough that the bread is all in one layer.
Bake at 400° for about 10 minutes, turning the cubes once with tongs at about 8 minutes. Remove when they are golden all the way around.
And that’s it.
Let’s see, creamy Italian dressing, bacon bits, and now herbed croutons. What ever could this be leading up to?
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7 Comments
And what do you do with all those crusts? We give ours to the dogs. Do you have a dog handy?
Hmmm, creamy Italian dressing, pig bits, and croutons . . . I know! You’re going to make a cake!
Yes, I have a dog handy. No, he didn’t get the crusts. Stay tuned, that should be up later tonight.
I’ve never made croutons before, but now I might. I’m pretty jealous of your bread selection. I’d have to pay an arm and a leg to get something like that where I live.
I would say, “Well then make your own.” But even I can’t imagine making fresh bread just so I can cut it up to make croutons.
Wow, this brings back such fond memories of my late mother. If she wanted something crunchy and salty it was either Cheetos or croutons. She’d leave out a loaf of bread overnight to get stale and turn the entire thing into croutons. She ate nearly all of them herself if she was so unlucky as to be making them when we were home. I mean, we HAD to have fresh, hot buttery croutons. The smell was divine. Mostly she made them after we’d gone to bed or when we were in school though. And then she HID them from us!
Honestly, I don’t ever remember eating croutons on salad until after i left home.
Genie, I think I would have liked your mom.
I just now realized you’ve solved one of my ongoing problems. Every so often I get a craving for something crunchy and salty and yes, I love the Cheetos too. I’ve been trying to figure out what I can make instead. I never thought to do croutons just as a snack all on their own, but why not?
Now I’ve got all kinds of flavor ideas running through my head: garlic, pepper, cheese, dill, oregano, basil, heck all of them together. Now to figure out how to make them in larger batches and store them for a little while, so I don’t have to be baking every three days.
Mom made them entirely in the oven, in a large baking pan, drizzling them with butter and seasonings and turning them frequently until they were done. Once cool, they went into a gallon Ziplock bag but it seems they’d have been less messy in any air tight container with a wide mouth.
I have resisted the urge to make them. I think it would start me on a months long crouton binge!