Actually very easy

Croutons

The beliefCroutons are assumed to be a packet product, and a home version is expected to be just fried bread.

The truthA crouton is stale bread coated in fat and dried out. The only thing the packet adds is that the drying was finished.

25 minutes

How to make it

What you need

300 g stale bread
60 ml olive oil
1 clove of garlic
1 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of dried thyme or chilli flakes

How the engine read this list (5 lines)

—	Stale bread	no record
55 g	Olive oil	olive-oil
5 g	Garlic	garlic
5 g	Salt	salt
2 g	Dried thyme	thyme

An empty weight means that line could not be turned into grams — either the amount is open ("to taste") or the ingredient has no record here. Neither enters the sum as zero; they do not enter it at all.

Cut the bread into two-centimetre cubes. Even sizes matter: the small ones burn before the big ones dry.
Mix the oil with the crushed garlic, leave it five minutes and take the garlic out. Garlic burns bitter in the oven.
Put the cubes in a bowl, pour the oil over and turn them until every one shines.
Scatter the salt and herbs and spread them in a single layer on a tray.
Bake at 170 °C for 15 to 18 minutes, stirring once or twice. Gold outside and dry through.
Cool them completely on the tray, then jar them.

Why it works

The crispness of a crouton comes in two stages: first the fat fills the pores of the bread, then the oven drives the remaining water out and the fat holds those spaces open. Bread dried without fat is crisp too, but brittle and dusty; the fat makes the break clean and leaves a coating in the mouth. The temperature is critical: between 160 and 180 °C the bread dries from the inside out, while at 220 °C the surface browns with the middle still damp and the crouton goes soft within a day. That is the real difference between fried bread and a crouton — one is bread with a treated surface, the other is bread dried all the way through. It is also why stale bread is preferred: the free water in fresh bread keeps the fat out of the pores.

The rough sum

67 grams going in

495 kcal in total

100% of the mass has figures behind it. This is the sum of what GOES IN rather than of what comes out. Wherever something evaporates, drains or ferments the two differ: a kilo of milk is 150 g of cheese.

Diets it qualifies for

Gluten-free Vegan Vegetarian Lactose-free

Storage & shelf life

How long it keeps

A closed jar at room temperature: 2 weeks
Freezer: 3 months
In a bag: 4 days
A jar closed while hot: Half a day: it softens in its own steam

Croutons are made from stale bread, but stale here does not mean dry: recrystallised starch absorbs less fat, so croutons from stale bread come out less greasy and crisper than ones from fresh. The single rule for keeping them is not to close the jar before they are cold. Steam from a warm crouton condenses in the jar and softens the lot within two hours.

When to bin it A bitter smell means the fat has oxidised: throw them out. Soft ones dry again in five minutes at 160 °C.

History

Where it comes from

The word is the French *croûton*, a bit of crust, and the origin is simply not throwing bread away. In medieval Europe stale bread served as the plate under the soup — the word "sop" comes from there. Its place in Caesar salad spread from Caesar Cardini’s plate in Tijuana in 1924, and the crouton turned from a way of using up bread into an ingredient in its own right. Its Turkish equivalent is the cubes of bread fried beside a bowl of lentil soup.

The knack

Break one open: if the middle is still soft, give them five more minutes.
Crusty bread makes better croutons; sandwich bread is too open and drinks the oil.
With butter instead of oil, drop the oven to 160 °C: the milk solids darken sooner.

Dough and grain