"breadcrumbs" news and stories

There's a DIY project (from Tasarim) making the rounds that's perfect for sharing your bread with your feathered friends. As you can see above, a simple wood shelf has large holes for the crumbs to fall in, which get collected, and directed down a tube that sails straight to a bird feeder.

I'm not entirely convinced that there are birds out there would you patiently wait below and not just fly up a little bit and peruse the board themselves, but this idea could still be handy in the kitchen, and for those who don't have hungry birds. Just make it into a larger crumb catcher. Cut slats into a simple board like that, and make a box base for it. Then you can easily and quickly collect all your scraps, and really make the use out of your bread. When you've got a bunch, just grind it into uniform breadcrumbs.

[via Serious Eats and Treehugger]

I've made breadcrumbs a handful of times in the past, but never on a regular basis. However, I've had many missed breadcrumb opportunities as I've thrown away more crusts of bread than I'd like to admit. In an attempt to stop tossing perfectly good food, I've been trying to reinvent ingredients and last night, I made meatballs as a way to avoid waste.

The meatballs became dinner because I had a pound of local, grass-fed ground beef in the freezer and a big hunk of two week old bread (really good bread from Philly's Metropolitan Bakery) that needed to be used up. I also managed to salvage some aging green onions and the last two inches of a log of goat cheese in the process.

I always forget how easy it is to make breadcrumbs and how homemade ones enhance any food you pair them with. They gave the meatballs an appealing lightness while also allowing the exteriors to get nicely crunchy, creating a fantastic textural pairing. They're also wonderfully simple to make. My instructions are after the jump and the step-by-step pictures are in the gallery below.

When I was a kid, there was little I hated more than when my mom would make a peanut butter sandwich for my lunch using the heel of the bread. She didn't do it all that frequently, mostly when she hadn't been able to get to the store and there was no reserve loaf of bread in the freezer (on occasion she'd also use a whole wheat hot dog bun).

Marie at Make and Take doesn't force her children to suffer through sandwiches on the heels of bread. She saves them in her freezer and, when she's accumulated a good stash, processes them into homemade bread crumbs. She included step-by-step pictures in her post, along with a collection of recipe links that all use toasted bread crumbs. These days, when we're all trying to find ways to save a few pennies here and there, repurposing undesirable bread into crumbs seems like a good way to go.

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Frank Bruni dined at Del Posto this week, Mario Batali’s newest venture in New York City. Apart from the official review, Mr. Bruni waxed philosophical about the marks of a celebrity-staffed restaurant. First and foremost is visibility, because to capitalize on the recognition that a celebrity has, they must be seen. This means that the chefs will often spend half their time wandering around the dining room and not necessarily in the kitchen. But celebrity can spark other unusual things in a restaurant. For example, diners at Del Posto were given a bag of breadcrumbs as they left. No, customers were not expected to make a trail back to the restaurant. They were given a sheet of information on how breadcrumbs are used in various dishes so they could try cooking them at home.

Never having been confronted by a phenomenon such as this, I cannot say how I would react. Clearly the purpose is to further the celebrity of the chef by inspiring cooking at home based on his or her recipes and not necessarily to further the reputation of the restaurant. After all, if they wanted people to eat out more frequently, shouldn’t they discourage them from cooing at home?

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