by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: December 19, 2009

How to make breadcrumbs may at first appear to be an extremely straightforward consideration. One may simply state that the way to make breadcrumbs is simply to take a piece of bread and crumble it by hand. What one has to take in to account, however, when considering how to make breadcrumbs, is that there are not only many different types of bread from which breadcrumbs can be made, there are also different stages of freshness which can apply to the bread from which one wishes to make crumbs.

Ideally, how to make breadcrumbs is best achieved when one uses a fairly thick, outside slice of bread which is at least a couple of days old. This will mean that the bread is past its best and has dried out and hardened slightly without being completely stale or having begun to grow mould. By holding the piece of bread crust side down in the palm of one hand, it is then possibly to simply crumble much of the bread by running the fingers of one’s other hand backwards and forwards, fairly firmly, across the top of it and allowing the resultant crumbs to fall on to a clean plate.

Alternatively, if one wishes to make more uniformly sized breadcrumbs or to crumble as much of the bread as possible, one can make breadcrumbs very effectively with a cheese grater. The slice or piece of matured bread would in this instance simply be rubbed up and down the surface of the grater and the breadcrumbs similarly collected on a plate. It is important here to remember that it is not the pressure applied to the bread on the grater which produces best results but the backwards and forwards or up and down motion. Pressing too hard will simply compress the piece of bread and cause it to break rather than crumble.

Where the only bread one has may at first appear to be too moist and fresh in order to be of use in making breadcrumbs, there are a couple of simple procedures which one can follow in order to produce the best results. Either the bread may be put in the toaster at the lowest possible setting or simply placed in a hot oven for a couple of minutes to dry it out. This will thereafter allow perfect breadcrumbs to be produced by one or other of the methods described above in the above paragraphs.

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