Today I am joining Try New Adventures Thursday over at Alicia's Homemaking with the story of my first ever attempt at making my own breadcrumbs. Why would you ever want to make breadcrumbs from scratch when they sell them at the grocery store? I suppose you could do it to be frugal or to be fresh/organic/pioneer-y. I, however, did it to be wheat-free. As you know, my son is allergic to wheat. For months we've been buying him his own gluten-free bread, but he hates crust, which leaves at least two pieces of bread at the end of each loaf, and these are expensive loaves of bread so I hated to throw any of it out. So I've been keeping the heels in my freezer and in the back of my head thought I might one day make breadcrumbs.Then came the moment of truth. I had mayonnaise chicken (just a breaded chicken recipe we like) coming up on my menu and it was time to do my little experiment.
I had to go to the web to find out what to do. I got my basic instructions here. Is it sad that I needed instructions? I had frozen bread and I didn't know if I needed to bake it, toast it, defrost it, or leave it to out to get stale??? So I googled it and got the help I needed. Love the internet! So it turned out I did need to bake the bread to dry it out. Here are the heels all lined up on my cookie sheet, I just used as much as fit on one sheet, it left me just a few slices to put back in my freezer for next time.
Once the bread was done, I whipped out my fabulous Magic Bullet blender. I put in only a few chunks of bread at a time, then poured the crumbs into a bowl and fished out any un-blended chunks for the next go-round and so on till everything was nicely ground up. And voila, homemade wheat-free breadcrumbs!
I put the breadcrumbs in a ziploc bag and when it came time to make my chicken, I poured some out as usual, mixed them with spices (I normally just buy the Italian breadcrumbs already seasoned, so this time I had to add that step) and proceeded as usual--and the chicken turned out great. My husband thought it was better than usual, I thought it was pretty much identical in flavor, so either way that was a win. (I used almost all of this batch, and kept what was left in the pantry till next time.)
The verdict: super easy! I will definitely keep doing this so we always have wheat-free breadcrumbs in the pantry.
For more Adventures, be sure to check out Alicia's Homemaking.
What new things have you tried lately?
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