Bread
was once nourishing. Jesus was a fan, Thoreau too. Sandwiches were invented and
families were brought up on the stuff. During the war, flour was bulked out with
sawdust. Then we got Wonder Bread, which, for anyone not familiar with the
concept of artificial bread, is artificial bread. It doesn’t mould. It doesn’t
live, practically sawdust. Bread is chemically leavened, chemically preserved,
“more the product of the embalmer’s art than the baker’s”. All of a sudden
gluten was bad for us and everyone knew that it was especially bad for them,
personally. You can find recipes for making pancakes… with cauliflower…
Dieticians tell us to eat fat and protein. Others, only to eat things that are
green. They tell us to go back to the forager’s diet, to a beginning full of
nuts and seeds. They tell us to look over a major step in our evolution; that
it’s no big deal that finally, with things like the bread made from our first
experiments in farming grains 10,000 years ago, we had a constant source of
calories, something we could store throughout the winter. No big deal that with
bread, we evolved from hoping we’d find a deer to kill to masters of our own
dinners.
Then
I found the breads made by restaurant As. Great bread, alive, organic, hearty,
chewy. Something you can keep using for a month. Add a bit of water, put it in
the oven and it’s back to fluffy. Back to crusty. And the baguettes of Le
Fournil deserve poems but for the fact they'll be old by lunch time.
But
these breads are exceptions. Much of the rest you find in Amsterdam will go
un-reversibly stale within days. It’ll likely only be ¾ baked too, and
flavourless. What to do with all those lemons in life? Make lemonade.
1. Pappa
al pomodoro
Italians
also have bad bread, which is probably why they have so many recipes for
re-using it. This is the soup version of bruschetta, a tomato soupy-stew made
with a lot of garlic, olive oil and bread.
Fry 3 thinly sliced garlic cloves in some oil until it begins to brown. Add 1kg chopped dark-red tomatoes and
season with salt and pepper. Simmer for 40 mins until oil rises to surface.
Add 800 ml of water to tomatoes and bring
to boil.
Take
pan off fire and stir in 200g stale
bread, torn into chunks. Stop stirring once the bread is immersed so it
doesn’t break up. Leave soup to cool so only just warm and chop in some basil. Top with some fruity olive oil and
serve.
2. Kale,
leek and ricotta bread pudding
This is a recipe that I’ve made 3 times in
as many months as I’ve owned Claire Ptak’s book, The Violet Bakery Cookbook. If you have it, flip to page 78
and make it. If you don’t, buy it.
3. Chocolate
bread pudding
Easy and gooey.
Preheat
oven to 160 degrees C and butter your medium baking dish. Arrange thickly sliced pieces of old bread (about
a loaf) so that they overlap, filling the dish.
To
make chocolate mixture, heat 3 cups
whole milk, 280g chopped chocolate,
½ cup sugar and ½ tsp salt in a heatproof bowl placed over pan of simmering water.
Stir whilst the chocolate melts. Remove from heat before completely melted to
prevent burning and continue to stir. Cool.
Crack
6 large eggs, one at a time, into
the chocolate, whisking after each crack. Pour the mixture over the bread and
let sit at room temperature for about an hour until the bread is saturated.
Cook
for about 30 minutes, or until pudding is just set (as in, not totally wiggly.
Some wiggle is good). Let cool slightly and eat.
