Can croutons offset climate change?
Or at least a small part of it?
Here’s the graving on that bread you have been throwing away: It is outrageous!
According to The Waste and Resources Action Programme (which operates as WRAP), a UK based food waste charity, the food most wasted in the home is Bread. The UK alone wastes 900,000 tonnes of bread every year. That’s about 24 million slices, or 1 million loaves of bread Daily. Which accounts for 44% of all UK bread!!!
WRAP further estimates that bread waste is responsible for 318k tonnes of CO2 annually, the same emissions created yearly by almost 70k cars. In other words, if just Brits alone would stop wasting bread for one year it would be the same as planting more than 5 million trees!!!
Since data about this kind of waste is hard to come by, Let’s extrapolate the numbers for the US from the UK ones. Assuming a similar consumer behavior, That would give almost 4 million tonnes of bread waste in the US or an extra 300k cars adding their CO2 pollution to our anyhow warming world.
So today, we are going to make croutons and save the world from climate change. OK, not save per se but create a dent…
The Form Dilemma
You can make croutons from almost every bread known in existence, try it yourself out of your favorite stale bread - I dare you finding one that does not work well. If you did, please share below!
We are going to work here with at least a 2–3 days old bread. I’d normally use some kind of white flour bread with a light and fluffy structure inside, since these are the kinds of breads consumed in my household.
Personally I’ve found a 2–3 days old Challah bread, which is a type of traditional Jewish braided bread, gives me the most bang for my croutons buck. As it also comes with sprinkled sesame seeds which add a fantastic layer of flavor when toasted. This kind of bread also allows you to easily tear it apart by hand to get more of a disorderly aesthetic, which has it’s own merits because chaotic geometric structures like these:
Allow much more surface face for interaction than these ones:
And Enhancing interaction, enhances the flavor. But I also love the aesthetics and drama that the shredded form of croutons adds to the plate.
The Basics
Let’s face it, making croutons is not a rocket science:
Choose your bread, cut or tear it apart. Mix it with your oil ,melted butter, or any other form of healthy fat. Season & Flavor it with your beloved spice mix or not, and choose your technique to make it: Oven, pan, or toaster.
I am usually making my croutons, cut or shredded, with or without added flavor, in a preheated oven of 160C/320F for 15–20 minutes - that’s the rule of thumb! If you want you can turn them half way through or be lazy like me and leave them be. Each oven has it’s own personality so play with yours to find out the exact times and heat suited to your palate’s liking.
I’m gonna make here five kinds of croutons. Two which are pretty standard and three which demonstrate the amazing creative potential and the different tastes you can infuse into pieces of old bread.
The first kind are those oven simple croutons. Cut the bread to cubes, oil them with something like a quarter cup of olive oil to for a half loaf. You can use more oil. I’m usually using more. Give them a healthy dash of salt & pepper, mix and in the preheated oven as mentioned above for 15–20 minutes they go. Great!
Now Let’s do the fast food croutons version that I usually make in a hurry: Toast the bread in a toaster, rub it with a garlic clove, olive-oil it, salt, pepper and cut to cube like shapes. It’s almost like making bruschetta but stopping before the tomatoes when things get really interesting. It’s the lazy man’s crouton. But the result is crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside and full with pungent garlickiness.
Now let’s infuse some serious flavor and drama into our croutons. I’m tearing my bread apart to the size and form I prefer before it goes into a bowl. Add olive oil, black pepper, season and now enters the choice of dried spices or herbs to get more taste into the surface of your croutons.
One of my Favorite mixes for the Crouton Job is Za’atar mix. If you never tried it before you are in for a serious treat. It’s base is toasted sesame seeds, salt,and other spices such as sumac, thyme or oregano.
after adding generous amount of Za’atar, Toss the ingredients around and move them into a sheet pan with parchment paper inside a preheated oven set to the usual 160C / 320F. Remember we don’t only want to toast the bread we also want to dry it! To remove the water content so it can later on act as a sponge with the Salad sauce or the soup or anything else liquidy for that matter.
These Za’atar croutons are a going to join a simple salad: Some arugula, tomatoes, black olives, feta cheese and some french dressing. The Za’atar croutons take this salad to the middle east of the plate, and dramatically enhance the Feta cheese taste.
Haute Croutons
Now it’s time to move up the food chain and demonstrate how in reality, croutons can offer a huge amount of creative possibilities and play. We will start by making croutons, which are done a bit differently from those last ones we did. Instead of Za’atar or other herbs, they meet the bold taste of blue cheese, in this case I’m using Gorgonzola. I am not exaggerating when I’ll claim that this is a match made in heaven for this easy summery Yogurt green-pea soup I’ve paired them with. The soup is easy enough to make combining 7 minutes boiled peas with Yogurt after they cooled down, and meshing them into a smoothie like consistency with some salt and pepper. This time we are mixing the croutons with melted butter before they go in the oven. After 12 minutes in the oven I’m adding the cheese and return them into the oven for another 5–8 minutes. And there you have it — Blue cheese croutons swimming in a summer cold Yogurt soup delight.
Lastly I want to show that you can make your croutons also on the sweet side. If you happen to have a sourdough leftover bread it will give a fantastic contrast to the sweetness, but any bread will do. Once again, tear & oil but this time our spice is going to be Cocoa Powder. Sprinkle it using a sieve, followed by coarse grain Atlantic sea salt and bake as usual. The result is tiny bundles of sweetness to be enjoyed while they are still warm and fragrant. I decided to add them to some north European style strawberry jelly topped with vanilla pudding sauce, but you do you.
The joy of those toasty cocoa croutons dipping in the Vanilla sauce was a true revelation.
So there you have it, five types of croutons, two types of crouton topography. And one way out of many, to use old bread and save green house gas emissions while also reducing food waste.
