You can bake that s#@%: Stale bread

In pursuit of starchy immortality

Last spring I was at Le Cordon Bleu Paris, sitting in a lecture about a jelly candy called pâte de fruits, when the head pastry chef told us that jam—humble, chunky jam!—is one of the oldest candies in the world. It was a moment when a sweet truth hit home for me: Dessert isn’t just a course at the end of a meal that some poor fools skip. It’s also one of civilization’s most tried and true ways to extend the life of food that would otherwise spoil. Dessert—and I am totally unbiased here—may be our most undersung solution to food waste and climate change. 

If food waste were a country, it would have the third-largest emissions after China and the US. Here in America, nearly 40% of food waste happens in our homes, on our watch. The way we cook and bake could make a big difference, and we wouldn’t have to buy or do anything other than work more efficiently with what we already have. 

This new series, which I’ll drop by your inbox monthly during the summer and fall, will challenge you to look at your leftovers and ask: Can I bake that s#@%?

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You can bake that s#@%: Stale bread

This month, we begin with the #5 most-wasted food in America and the scourge of every sourdough baker I know: leftover bread. 

The frenemy of the waste-conscious baker

Step 1: Plan ahead

The key with bread—sourdough or otherwise—is to practice foresight. Do you have more than you’ll be able to eat? If so, slice or cube those pre-leftovers pronto, claiming them as building blocks for a future meal before it becomes a sword-in-the-stone situation. I typically cube, bag, and freeze for later in the week.

Step 2: Get inspired

Every bread-centric food culture has recipes for bread afterlives. Some recipes, like panzanella and croutons, lean further into the natural drying process by toasting. Others, like bread pudding and French toast, go the opposite direction and rehydrate stale bread with a custardy soak (the same approach as my overnight skin cream, just less hopeless). A third technique calls for blitzing stale bread into crumbs for a DIY Panko, but that’s a shade too much work for me. I don’t get out a food processor for much other than key lime pie. 

So: To toast, or to soak? To go sweet, or to go savory? And in the spirit of Tamar Adler, the writer and cook behind The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, a third question: Could any of these stale bread recipes flow from one into the next, forming a series of sequential afterlives? 

Tamar’s recent cookbook argues that putting on reuse-colored-glasses is half the work of efficient cooking and baking. By her logic, leftovers from a pan of vegetables roasted on Sunday could go in a stir-fry on Tuesday; then the stir-fry remnants could bulk up a soup on Thursday. 

So what’s the equivalent for stale bread? I came up with two pathways that can give that loaf you thought was a goner nearly as many lives as a cat, as long as you squint hard and are bad at counting.

Step 3: Choose-your-own-adventure

Savory

• Life 1: Bread. Once stale, cube it.

• Life 2: Toss bread cubes with oil, and toast them for spice-as-you-wish sourdough croutons (a recipe by my friend Erica Du).

• Life 3: Leftover croutons could become the basis of this any-season breakfast strata. Or skip directly from Life 1 to Life 3.

Sweet

• Life 1: Bread. Once stale, slice it.

• Life 2: Soak slices and sear to French-toast perfection. (Try this a couple times with milk, an egg, and spices and you won’t need a recipe anymore).

• Life 3: Transform leftover French toast into bread pudding with bourbon sauce. Or skip directly from Life 1 to Life 3.

Step 4: Cut yourself a bread break

None of us are perfect. If seeking starchy salvation isn’t in the cards this week, remember that composting is better than nothing. So is throwing entire slices of bread in the general direction of birds.

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Stale bread glam

The French call French toast pain perdu—lost bread. But at Frappe, a bakery in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, it goes by another name. Day-old brioche is cut into cubes, soaked, dredged in sugar, and seared to caramelized nirvana. They call it pain retrouvé—found bread.