Saved Bread

Salvage day on a very hot summer day.

My first attempt on baguette failed last time. I am now stuck with the undercooked but hard bread which I had already tried to break again into pieces and make into a bread pudding. I made it late last week, and I had been brainstorming how to reuse it so the 5-6 C of flour that I used will not totally go to waste. There were other sites that inspired me like this one for saving stale bread challenge, and this for the general leftover ideas. Eureka moment when I found this site today.  

At first, I thought about making it into a soup but there was a lot of just for that. Then I thought maybe I can experiment with a bread pudding. The thing is my bread has already some herbs and I didn't feel like eating a sweet bread at the moment. I'd have to go for the non-sweet one like garlic or vegie filled bread.

Taking a little gamble on my very limited kitchen skills, I imagined soaking the hard bread in milk and adding some frozen vegies and more herbs and spices. And here is how it all turned out. Edible. 

It would have been better if I had added some tomatoes which we happen to have. I also forgot to add garlic and more vegies. Or maybe I just didn't want to take a bigger risk or using up a lot of my vegies for something that I might actually have to throw if all things didn't turn out well.

As usual, I'll try to write down what I did for my future reference. 

• 2 C of underbaked and hardened bread
• 1 C milk

Other things I just added roughly.

• 2 T margarine, melted
• 2 T bell pepper, diced
• 2 T onion, diced
• 1/2-1 t pasta sprinkle
• dash of salt, black pepper, red pepper flakes

And here's how.

1. Tore the bread into small pieces.
2. Soaked the bread in milk for at least 30 minutes. 
3. Mixed in the rest. 
4. Baked at 250 degrees C for the first 10 minutes. (I didn't pre-heat the oven.)
5. The lowered it to 150 for the remaining 30 minutes. 

When I finally got to taste it, I tried to put some ketchup and even hot sauce on it and it did improve the taste. I'm just relieved that my almost-ready-to-be-thrown out bread is still useful. 

Until my next baking adventure.