Travelers Cafe cont...: Croutons

When running a restaurant you try to have as little waste as possible. I would tell my employees “this is not food to me, its money”. So with that as my mantra, you need to be very creative with what you do with scraps.

We used to buy our bread from a local bread company in the Chicago area called Labriola Bakery. They had the most wonderful artisan bread!!! We used their 9 grain, whole wheat, white, pretzel bread, assiago rolls and their tomato and their herbed focaccia bread. So any scraps we had of bread (the heel or stale bread) went into the freezer for making croutons!

Croutons really are easy to make and you can literally make them any flavor you need or want. It’s all in the seasoning that you use.

The project I’m working on at work right now has been bringing in lunch for us. Every day it’s something different and local. They don’t use chains, they order from local mom and pops type places which make me really happy!!

Thursday we had pulled pork from a place called McCormick’s. I looked at all the rolls we had left over after lunch and immediately thought of croutons. They had also sent a canister of spices and I decided that would be good for the croutons. I went home that night and immediately went to work! Below is my creation.

So when life gives you heels of bread or stale bread or not enough bread to make a sandwich with, make croutons!!

Teri

Notes: Like I said above, you can make any flavor croutons you like, it’s all in the spices. The mix I used had salt, pepper and Italian spices. (oregano, basil, rosemary, garlic powder) You can also buy any of the season mixes already prepared in the baking section.

You don’t have to use both butter and olive oil, you can just use either butter or just olive oil. There are so many wonderfully infused oils out there that you can use.

Croutons

1 stick of butter (1/2 cup) melted
½ cup of olive oil
2 tablespoons of spices
8 cups of bread

Preheat oven to 400°

Cut up bread into the size cubes you want. Put in bowl. Mix melted butter and olive oil together and pour half over bread; mix well. Add the rest of the oil butter mixture to the bread and mix well. Sprinkle seasoning over bread and mix well.