Have you ever ordered a salad that arrived topped with pale, tough tablets that came from a box or bag – the commercial version of croutons? Maybe you’ve purchased prepared croutons at the food store, and used them yourself. In a few luckier circumstances, you might have eaten at a restaurant that makes their own croutons, perhaps from their own leftover bread stocks.
My own response to these crisps is, almost universally, grave disappointment, sometimes laced with horror. In my life I may have been served great croutons less than a handful of times. They are never regarded with respect by any but the very finest restaurants. In fact, they croutons usually are sad and stale placeholders for something that could be so satisfying.
A few years ago, while rescuing some breads for an upcoming batch of Turkey dressing, I worked up my own technique for toasted bread shards that changes the game; these croutons are a delight – good enough to simply eat as a snack, but game-changing for salads and even soups.
The trick is not simply the butter, seasoning, and toasting. That’s baseline. What makes these Croutons so tasty is the texture. My croutons are not made from regimented, carved cubes or tablets of bread, which are so often hard biscuits, like some oversized, generic dogfood. They are “torn” by hand, following the internal grain of almost any good baguette, batard, or loaf of hard-wheat yeast-raised bread.
The secret is to deconstruct a loaf of bread, pulling it apart such that the subtle layers yield smaller-than-bite-sized, very irregular megacrumbs. They are torn with a bit of care so as to avoid compacting the texture, each crouton an irregular asteroid of variable thickness, but with multiple shear edges.
These shards are then spread lightly over a baking sheet and toasted (at first, gently) in an oven (not too hot at first, somewhere between 300 and 350 F). If it’s a small batch, I may use an ovenproof frying pan and begin the process on a burner. But you can’t really do much until they’ve been in the over a while. Once the texture is firm enough to toss them around without compressing, I dot butter around the pan and stir the croutons such that each has come in contact with molten butter, the goal being that each entire crouton is imbued with butter, though not to the point of greasiness. As the bread and butter brown together, the crouton becomes a beautifully-brown, relentlessly crispy and light morsel.
With the butter beginning to enrich every crouton, I add seasoning. My formula is simple, salt, some white pepper, and enough garlic (powder or granulated) to flavor the room. At this point I turn up the temperature of the oven so we achieve a nice level of browning, watching them carefully. If you take them out when light brown, I’m guessing the crutons are not toaasted quite enough. They really want to get close to the Melba toast color…..
Once cooled, store in a sealed container. They will stay good and crispy for several days, if they last that long.
How do I use them? Ceaser-type salads, of course. And with a salmon salad as a deconstructed bagel combo. On tomato soups. And just as a snack.
What bread do I choose? You can use almost any yeast-risen bread that was intended for table service – hard rolls, baguettes, batards…. It needs to be a bread that has sufficient texture to yield large crumbs that are do not compress. Any “French bread” that might have been destined for great French toast will do. Certainly the James Beard French-style bread you’ll find at this site is perfect. Even the simple Pullman loaf (recipe on this site) will work if you slice any remainder and let it dry a bit before tearing. It is, truly, the tearing that matters. That’s how you create the thin and cellular crispy edgest that are tasty and somewhat lacey…
Link to this Page: https://botanyincontext.com/tasty-croutons/