So I’ve been getting a little bit obsessive lately. It’s not good enough to cook from scratch. First I have to make my ingredients. I make my own grill seasoning, my own mayonnaise for Pete’s sake! (By the way, who’s Pete and why do we care about his sake?)
Recently when I went to make hamburgers I accidentally looked at the ingredients on the can of bread crumbs. Holy crap! Time to make my own, I guess. This was just supposed to be a way to use up stale leftovers. [sigh]
Ingredients
(You may recognize this from the herbed croutons recipe.)
Directions
Start with a stale piece of bread. If you don’t want to wait for it to go stale on its own, just toss it in the oven after cooking something else. Leave it there until the oven is cool and you’ve got stale bread.
Cut it up into pieces that will fit in your food processor.
Tell yourself for the eight thousandth time that you have got to get a big one.
Process until you don’t see any large pieces any more. Then go a bit longer.
Dump the crumbs out into a bowl.
Rap the bowl several times with the heel of your hand. The large pieces will come up to the top.
Scoop the larger pieces back into the processor and process a bit more. When it’s all done, and you’ve used as much as you need for the burgers, put the rest in an air-tight container.
Keep it in the fridge. If you had any moisture left at all, the crumbs will mold.
And that’s it.
I meant to wait two weeks before trying the bread and butter pickles. I couldn’t wait.
So it turns out I wasn’t careful enough with the turmeric. I couldn’t fit the measuring spoon in the jar, so I just dumped it out into the spoon. And got too much. Some recipes include a tiny bit of turmeric for color. But if you use a bunch it has a bitter, peppery taste. That’s why it’s frequently the second ingredient in mustard.
So this batch is pretty good, in my opinion. But they’re more like a hot Polish style than the bread and butter I’m used to.
That’s cool. I like hot pickles. And a couple of people have told me they did this recipe and they came out great. I guess they were more careful with the turmeric than I was.
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9 Comments
Do you know I have never in my life bought bread crumbs? It just never occurred to me. Of course, what that means is that when I have a recipe that calls for them, I never have them and have to hunt around for whatever stale bread or crackers I can find to make some. If I were more organized, I’d make them and freeze them, but I’m not.
But I DO have some dill pickles in the refrigerator right now that I made last Friday. This is my first attempt at pickles, so this should be interesting . . .
But … you didn’t start as a country girl. How’d you manage to never buy bread crumbs? Or did you not do any cooking until you were already countrified?
I dunno. My mom never bought them, and I never made a lot of stuff that called for them. My dad was vegan, so there weren’t a lot of casseroles, meat loaf, meatballs, etc. for the family.
My tastes and cooking have changed dramatically in the last five years, but yes, I have indeed cooked for myself pretty much since I moved out of my parents’ house for college.
I can’t imagine my dad being a vegan. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him eat a carrot.
Before his heart attack, one of his favorite snacks was to take a small pack of Velveeta and a bag of pretzel rods. One slice of Velveeta at a time wrapped around one bite of pretzel at a time. Yes, he’d eat the whole pack. I think that would be the one-pound size.
That’s . . . disturbing, with the Velveeta. My dad grew up in Wisconsin consuming mass quantities of cheese and cannibal sandwiches (steak tartare and raw egg on bread–a Wisconsin specialty) and became vegetarian, then vegan, to keep control of his cholesterol when he was in the Air Force. Fighter pilots REALLY don’t want to have heart problems.
The irony is, because of a genetic defect, he ended up having to have heart surgery anyway about 5 years ago. Sometimes even the healthiest lifestyle (and his is about the healthiest you can imagine) can’t prevent problems. Which is why I consume heavy cream and butter with no guilt whatsoever.
I love your site. Nobody at our house will eat the end pieces of bread unless it’s homemade bread. So I freeze the heals and make bread crumbs whan I need them. It is a lot smarter to make them into crumbs and then freeze them like you say. Wow! Will I ever get over not thinking things through?
I have a tiny food processor, too! Although I like it, sometimes it is such a pain to have to grind, unload, load, grind, unload…You know what I mean?
Do I know what you mean? Are you freakin’ kidding me?! What do you think that little pity party up there was about. “Oh boo-hoo, woe is me.”
Ahem.
I mean … Why yes, I believe I do know what you mean.
Oh, and don’t forget the tip for buttering the corn I posted earlier in the week. I’m telling you, my brother and I would have needed a surveying crew to split that thing any more evenly in half.
I am munching on some olive loaf and it has just occurred to me that it would make excellent bread crumbs, should you have a bit of it left over stale…
Brady, wouldn't the chunks of olive gum up the food processor?