Sometimes you just want a crunchy treat. Chips or pretzels come to mind, but have you noticed the prices lately?
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, a 16-ounce bag of potato chips now costs 47% more than it did five years ago. Here at Casa Frugal we have a frugal workaround: homemade croutons.
I started making them for salads, but often they would be gone before supper because DF favors them as a snack. And why not? They’re salty and crunchy and incredibly cheap. Croutons can be made while you’re roasting meat or baking a cake; if you’re not cooking, you can bake them in an air fryer or toaster oven.
I can get a loaf of day-old Italian bread for as little as 58 cents. That means almost a pound of snacking joy – and as the years have gone by, I’ve refined the technique. Here’s how we do it.
Start by slicing the bread into cubes. How big the cubes are is up to you; I will say that the larger ones mean less work later on. Aim for as uniform a size as you can, so they cook at the same rate. (More on that later.)
Array the cubes on baking pans or platters and let them sit out for a day or so. I used to toast the freshly cut cubes before turning them into croutons, but no more. They’ll toughen up on their own, to be coated and toasted later on.
As you can see, one loaf makes a lot of cubes. If your region is plagued by flies, or if you have inquisitive pets, cover the bread cubes flour-sack towels or cheesecloth. Or let them get stale in a cold oven.
Note: I don’t make an entire loaf’s worth of croutons at one time. Instead, I store the stale cubes into the original bread bag until we’re planning a salad, or until I feel like surprising DF. He getrs unreasonably happy about a pan of “salty, crunchy air.”
Here’s the time-consuming part
To be clear, it’s not that time-consuming – at least, not since I wised up. The original crouton recipe said to toast the cubes in the oven, then shake them in a plastic bag with olive oil and spices.
Trouble is, they start to shed when you shake. The resulting oil-spice-crumb slurry is a pain in the neck to clean up afterwards. (Those who know me know it’s on-brand to wash and re-use plastic bags.) A couple of times I’d use a bag that I knew was on its last legs anyway, and toss it afterwards. Mostly, I’d just be irritated by the mess.
Then one day I realized, “Why not just dip them into the oil?” So I did that for a while, using a shallow bowl with a small amount of olive oil. It took time to coat all four sides, though, which led to another brainstorm: “Why not just dip the tops of the cubes? Wouldn’t they still be tasty even if only partially oiled and seasoned?”
Yep, they are. Bonus: The snack is even more frugal this way because I use less oil. We buy it at Costco so the price is reasonable, but no oil is cheap these days.
Here’s how I do it:
- I set a bunch of bread cubes into the (very shallow) pool of oil.
- When the bowl is full, I go back to where I began and start putting the cubes on a cookie sheet.
- Finally, I season the entire pan at the same time. We tried using powdered ranch dressing, and I may have flirted with an Italian herb seasoning a time or two. Ultimately, we decided to stick with seasoned salt. (Mmmmm, salty, crunchy air…)
I bake the croutons at whatever temperature is used for the meat loaf, cake or whatever’s already in the oven. This part is important: Croutons can burn very, very fast. You peek in and they’re barely browning, yet a couple minutes later they’re cinderized. Keep an eye on your pans.
One thing I never do is to use DF’s rustic bread for croutons. It never sticks around long enough to get stale.
Rustic bread works well to clean the oily residue out of the bowl before washing. Or you can be as obsessive of me and use a spatula to scrape the oil into your boiling bag liquid container. Why not use every bit of flavor? After all, you paid for it.
Frugal pro tips
An electric knife makes cutting up the bread sooo much faster.
Slice it on a larger cookie sheet if possible. I find it easier to brush the crumbs (and there will be crumbs) off a pan than a cutting board.
Don’t brush the tiny crumbs off right away, though. Leave them out for a day to get stale and then store in a tightly sealed container. Use them to extend ground-meat dishes like meatloaf, or to coat fried food.
Italian bread works better than French bread in my experience, because French bread is already darned hard. The resulting crust-shards make a huge mess.
Leftover soup seems much fancier if you float some croutons on top. Experiment with using cubes in other ways, such as bread soup, bread pudding* or DIY stove-top stuffing. If you’ve never eaten bread soup, search online for recipes; it can be as simple as broth, bread, and a few leftover beans or veggies.
Although I’m adding a good shake of that salt, I maintain that seasoned croutons are healthier than chips. After all, corn or potato chips are fried (and therefore soaked) in oil. The small amount of oil on a crouton is olive oil, which is good for you.
Maybe your household craves salty treats, or likes to jazz up a honeymoon salad** or a bowl of leftover minestrone. If so, check the manager’s special or day-old bakery rack for some Italian bread or hoagie rolls. The snack budget you save may be your own.
*The Fannie Farmer cookbook has a lovely and super-easy recipe for coconut bread pudding. It reminds me of the coconut custard pie I enjoyed as a kid.
**Honeymoon salad = lettuce alone.
Related reading:
I always love it when you write columns about food and frugality. You always shed new light on how to make simple foods great. Thanks!
Thanks for your kind words. I hesitate to turn the site into a food blog but as I always say, “food” is the section of your budget with the most wiggle room. And as prices go up and up, we need to find ways to conserve where we can.
Love your idea. I have done the same, but made bread sticks instead of croutons. So fun to come up with new ideas!
Tried to find some chink in your crouton armor, but that recipe sounds fantastic, and I’ll try it this weekend during our blizzard (5-8 inches; don’t laugh). Thanks for the tips – I know I’ll love these croutons, especially if I add just a little garlic salt!
Garlic salt, sriracha powder, ranch — these can be tailored to your individual tastes. Crunchy, salty, spicy air.
To be honest, we could use a little of your snow right around now. It was forty-three-freakin’-degrees yesterday! Ice reigns and there’s only maybe six inches of snow left in our yard. My partner is jonesing to go skiing (yay senior ski pass!) and I feel for all the folks whose snow removal businesses are being hit hard.
Thanks for reading, and for leaving a comment.
I’m definitely going to try! We are having homemade soup tonight so I wish I already had some. There’s a “winter storm” coming tomorrow here in Atlanta.
Nothing like your storms but people here lose their ever loving minds at the thought of an inch of snow! The ice we get here is truly dangerous though so we will not be going anywhere and hoping not to lose power
I make homemade croutons and am also a person that “snacks” on them more than i use them in a salad or soup! HA! I toss mine in a large bowl with a little oil and whatever seasoning suits my fancy at the time!! I can still get Pepperidge Farm/Arnold/Sara Lee bread products, and Entenmanns goodies, at my local dollar tree for $1.25 (too close to sell by date to have on regular grocery shelf) they get dropped off weekly and usually gone by midday!
The supermarket had bags of bread stuffing mix for 50 cents the other day, but these were teeny-tiny cubes and thus too much dipping work.
Long live crunchy, salty air.
I have a JASNA friend who works at a Panera in the next city to the west and often snaffles day-old goods for herself and friends, including entire loaves of bread. I’ve made croutons with this bread before, but I intend to try your new and improved method soon. (And the day-old goods would otherwise just be thrown out, so she considers herself to be preventing food waste as well as saving us all $$$.)
Panera bread makes awfully good French toast, and French toast makes an awfully good supper if you don’t feel like cooking anything heavy. Just a thought.
I just made French toast casserole for the first time the other day …OMG, if you like french toast, you must try it. All of the flavors and tastes but SO much easier. I ate half the 13×9 pan myself throughout the day, thought to myself “Why make something else, this is too darn tasty” 😉
Feeling dumb here…but 1. How much oil, approximately? 2. Bake first, then add oil and seasoning? That somehow seems backwards to me.
I pour a small amount of oil into a shallow bowl, and dip the cubes until the oil is gone. Add more as needed — but again, in very small amounts. I don’t measure it because that just means needing to wash a measuring spoon.
Then I season the entire pan of oiled cubes at one time (vs. shaking them in a bag), and bake.
The original way I was told to do it was to bake and then shake. But I disliked washing the slimy bags.
Hope that helps.
Donna,
I feel dumb for asking this but do you put the oiled croutons on a pan oil side up or oil side down? I’m thinking if the oil side is up, the salt will stick better but if the oil side is down, the cubes of bread might get a nice crispy bottom, yummy to snack on. Thanks.
I do oil-side-up, for the reason you mention: It traps and holds the seasoned salt (or whatever you decide to use). Or you could oil top and bottom and get that nice crispy bottom. Try it my way first, because you’ll have a baseline texture. I find they’re pretty crunchy with just a little oil, but YMMV.
Thanks for reading, and for leaving a comment.
Thank YOU for clarifying. I’m going to try your way first. Have you seen the price of a bag of croutons in the grocery store lately? Outrageous. DH and I love our Caesar salad with croutons and it’s painful to pay that much for crunchy, delicious air. I like your way better.
Genius! I save commercial bread heels and my own stale homemade bread for stuffing, and I’ve been meaning to try bread pudding, but I never thought of making croutons–perhaps because I don’t really care for them in salads. But as a snack…I think you’re on to something!
I’ve never heard of bread soup, but I do like to soak up soup or broth, with slices or strips of toast, so I suspect I’d like it. Off to do some internet sleuthing!