Homemade Croutons, and Why Oil Beats Butter

A crouton is bread, fat and heat, and homemade croutons are so far ahead of the boxed kind that it is faintly annoying nobody tries making them at home. Just give us fifteen minutes, one pan, and a half loaf you were going to throw away anyway.

The word comes from the French croûte, meaning crust, and in the sixteen hundreds it just meant a small piece of bread served alongside a drink. Four hundred years later the definition has not moved much, which means there is nowhere for a bad ingredient to hide. If the fat you use is dull, the crouton is dull, and there is nothing else in there to cover for it.

It also means the choice between oil and butter is not a matter of taste. One of them physically makes a better crouton.

Start With Stale, Crusty Bread

Use a loaf with a real crust and an open crumb such as sourdough, ciabatta, or a baguette. Those big irregular air pockets are what give you craggy edges and more surface to crisp, and sandwich bread has neither. Croutons made from a good loaf come out looking like nothing you could buy from a bag.

Day-old is better than fresh. Fresh bread carries more water, so it steams before it toasts and you end up with croutons that are brown outside and damp in the middle. This is the best possible answer to a half loaf going hard on the counter.

Cut it into three-quarter-inch pieces, roughly even so they cook at the same rate. If the bread is still soft enough that it squashes under the knife, tear it by hand instead, which gives you rougher edges anyway. Leave the crust on. It is the best-textured part of the finished crouton.

Oil or Butter

Butter is the traditional choice here, and butter does taste good on toast. It just does not make a crouton that crumbles perfectly.

Butter is only about eighty percent fat. The rest is water and milk solids. The water has to cook off before the bread can start crisping, and the milk solids brown unevenly and at a lower temperature than the bread does, so you get dark patches before the middle has dried out. Oil is pure fat, so all of it goes to work immediately, and the result is properly brittle rather than merely crunchy.

There is a flavor argument too, and it is simpler here than in most dishes. With four ingredients and no sauce, whatever the oil tastes like is most of what the crouton tastes like. A peppery Sicilian oil gives you a savory bite at the back of the throat that people usually assume came from seasoning.

Be generous. A third of a cup for a half pound of bread sounds like a lot until you see how fast bread drinks it up, and croutons made with too little oil come out chalky.

The Temperature Decides What You Get

This is where recipes disagree most, and both camps are right about different things.

Four hundred degrees for ten minutes gives you a crisp shell over a chewy centre. That is a good crouton if you are eating it in the next hour, and it goes stale by tomorrow because the inside is still holding moisture.

Three hundred and fifty for twenty minutes dries the cube all the way through. That is the crouton that keeps for a week in a jar on the counter, and it is the one worth making since you are heating the oven anyway.

Stir them every five minutes. The pieces around the edge of the pan take the most heat, and without stirring you get a tray where half are perfect and half are charcoal. Use a metal rimmed baking sheet rather than ceramic or stoneware, which do not conduct heat well enough to crisp, and do not crowd the pan. Two trays beat one crowded one, because bread packed together steams.

Garlic, Without the Powder

Nearly every crouton recipe reaches for garlic powder, and the reason given is usually that fresh garlic burns in the oven. That is true, and it is only true if the garlic goes in before baking.

Tip the croutons into a bowl straight out of the oven with a halved garlic clove and toss them for a few seconds. The hot rough surfaces grate the clove as they go past it, the same way rubbing a cut clove across hot toast does. You get real garlic, evenly spread, and none of the dusty note that powder leaves behind.

If you want more than that, grated Parmigiano tossed on while they are hot works well, and so does rosemary or thyme added with the oil before baking.

Homemade Croutons

Makes about 4 cups  ·  25 minutes

Ingredients

• 8 oz crusty day-old bread, cut or torn into ¾-inch pieces

• ⅓ cup extra virgin olive oil

• ¾ teaspoon fine sea salt

• ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

• 1 garlic clove, halved

Instructions

1. Heat the oven to 350°F with a rack in the middle.

2. Toss the bread with the olive oil first, until every piece is coated, then add the salt and pepper and toss again. Oil first is what makes the seasoning stick rather than fall onto the pan.

3. Spread the bread in a single layer on a rimmed metal baking sheet, with space between the pieces.

4. Bake for about twenty minutes, stirring every five, until golden and dry all the way through. Break one open to check.

5. Tip them straight into a bowl with the halved garlic clove and toss for a few seconds. Cool completely before storing.

Storing Them

Keep them in a sealed jar at room temperature. How long they last depends entirely on how dry they are, which is why the advice elsewhere ranges from five days to several weeks. A crouton that is crisp through holds a good week. One with any chew left in the middle goes soft by the next day, so eat those the same evening, which has never been difficult in our experience.

Serving It

Scatter them over a green salad at the table rather than tossing them in the bowl ahead of time, so they stay crisp until the last moment. They float on top of soup, they are good crushed over roasted vegetables, and they are very hard to leave alone in a bowl on the counter. Make more than you think you need.

Bread, salt, pepper and oil. With a list that short the oil is most of what you taste. Di Marco Olio is grown and pressed on one estate in Cefalà Diana, Sicily, picked by hand in the fall and cold pressed within forty-eight hours.