We have been experimenting with bread, now that the warm weather has subsided a bit (well,it had.  It appears to have come back with a vengeance but… hey).

The current experimentation is breadcrumbs.

The thing about homemade bread is that it goes stale far more quickly than store bought bread, so if you have a couple days of not eating bread, you have a rock in your fridge.  Good for breadcrumbs or bread pudding or stuffing… but there’s only so much of that you can eat, and Igo through maybe one tube of breadcrumbs every five years.

So… mixing bread crumbs back into bread.  The first experiment was ¼ cup to a 2-cups-of-fluid recipe, and you could barely notice any difference.  The bread was a little crumbly in texture — but that could have been the lackadaisical kneading.  (I am not all that good at making all variables the same, but OTOH all variables are never the same over a stretch of days.)

The second bread was one cup of breadcrumbs into the same 2-cups-of-fluid standard House Thorne bread recipe.  This one, I kneaded with the machine, and I also had a longer (overnight) sponge period — both of which build gluten.

Super chewy bread! The breadcrumbs made a nice texture in the bread without interfering with the crumb or the structure.  Hooray!

Next: cup and a half.  That’ll be this weekend, if we finish the second loaf before then…

…or maybe we’ll end up turning yesterday’s loaf into breadcrumbs for tomorrow’s loaf.