Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook! So glad you’re here!
You’ve heard the old adage “making lemonade out of lemons?” Today, I’m taking the serviceable focaccia bread I made earlier in the week and making croutons. The focaccia was fine. The croutons, on the other hand, were OUTSTANDING.
Croutons are great to have around for salads, soups and stews. They add a nice crunch and kick of flavor to whatever they encounter. Think tomato-basil soup topped with garlicky croutons. Ummmmmm….!
The method of turning the bread into croutons is pretty simple, and it’s a great thing to do to turn slightly stale bread into useable leftovers. I used about one of the focaccia loaves (about a pound of bread) and it made…quite a bit. I’m going to share my recipe with measurements for half that. They will be fine at room temperature for a while. I’m going to freeze the rest and see what happens and report back. I think I’m going to have to defrost and then reheat them to keep them from turning soggy, but we’ll see.
Bread will take on whatever flavor you want. I used butter, olive oil and garlic. My bread had rosemary and some olive bits still clinging to it and the croutons are buttery and delicious. But I could see adding other herbs–thyme. rosemary, even dill would probably be good. I wouldn’t try anything too juicy because it might turn the croutons soggy.
And if I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again–please, please, please use fresh, very high quality olive oil for this recipe–you really taste the olive oil here and if its off, the croutons will taste like rancid oil.
The olive oil I’ve used for years for my everyday use is Olivier in St. Helena, CA. It is very good quality olive oil at what I think is a fair price.
I recently ordered olives and olive oil from McEvoy Ranch in Sonoma, and I’m crushing pretty hard on this boutique brand. It’s more expensive, but so, so fresh and delicious. They include harvest dates on the bottles, which is nice. Just a note: I received no compensation from McEvoy products, and the opinions are my own.
I used the McEvoy olive oil and olives to make a little dipping sauce for the focaccia a couple of nights ago:
I chopped a couple of the olives very fine and then ground up about a teaspoon of herbes de Procence with a little course salt (maybe 1/2 tsp) in my mortar and pestle, and then mixed the olives and herb/salt mixture with about 1/4 cup of the McEvoy olive oil–wow. Very tasty and delicious with the focaccia bread (which…I have to say…was a little dry, so it benefitted from the addition of the dipping oil.)
For the croutons, I used good, old Kerrygold butter, the McEvoy olive oil and granulated garlic powder. The croutons came out absolutely delicious:
Crunchy on the outside, slightly chewy on the inside and bursting with buttery, garlicky goodness!
I’ll be placing them atop a Caesar salad tonight–look for the recipe in a future post!
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
