Easy Homemade Breadcrumbs

Do you read articles and think, I can do that, and you do it to ask yourself why didn’t I think of this? I did just that with homemade breadcrumbs. But the only problem is, I can’t find the article from the blogger I follow so I can give her credit. I may have read it on another blog so until I find it, I can’t give anyone credit for me making my own homemade breadcrumbs.

I normally don’t buy breadcrumbs unless I’m making cheese sticks. I use crushed saltine crackers in my meatloaf and in my salmon patties. When I read how easy it was to make bread crumbs without using up a good loaf of bread or allowing bread to sit out and stale to make them, I was like why didn’t I think of this on my own!

While I love the end pieces of homemade bread, store-bought end pieces are horrible. For years, I’ve torn them into pieces and thrown them out to the birds. But no more! Those end pieces are perfect for making homemade breadcrumbs. And if you are like me and find an odd piece of bread left in the bag, you can use it as well. Left over hamburger and hot dog buns would be perfect for homemade breadcrumbs.

For several weeks, I tied up my bread bag with the end and left over pieces and put them in the freezer. I had about 10 bags of bread pieces along with one spare hamburger bun when I pulled the bags out of the freezer on Saturday.

I placed them on two sheet pans in the oven at 300 degrees. Make sure you place the cut sides up with the outer sides down. This will help with making sure the inner part of the bread dries. As you can see in the picture I didn’t do that, and I had to flip the bread over so it would dry all the way through.

Bake the bread for about 20 minutes. The time will depend on your oven; I didn’t want to have bread slices that were not dried, so I left them for the 20 minutes. When I checked the dryness of the bread and they were ready to come out of the oven, I left them on the pan to cool completely before crushing them.

Using my food processor, I placed several pieces of bread in the bowl and processed for about 45 seconds. After trying two bowl fulls of bread, I realized the more bread you put in there, the longer it would take to chop up the bread. Depending on how coarse you want your crumbs, you’ll want to consider that when processing. With each bowl full of crumbs, I sifted them through my colander to separate any large pieces. I processed those pieces once more and used the back of a spoon to crush any that didn’t finish in the food processor.

Storing these breadcrumbs depends on you and how often you use them. I placed mine in a quart size canning jar and stored them in a cool dark place. We deal with high humidity here, so if these crumbs fall victim to the humidity, I’m not out any money.

While these are just plain bread crumbs, you can take them up a notch and add Italian seasonings (oregano, basil, marjoram, garlic powder, etc.) or any other seasoning to the breadcrumbs.

Homemade Breadcrumbs

Ingredients:

• Left over (end pieces) bread

Directions:

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Place bread on a sheet pan with cut sides up and bake for about 20 minutes. Check the bread after about 12 minutes to be sure it dries without burning. When the bread is dried out, let it cool completely on the pan. Place bread slices in the food processor and chop until you have crumbs. Store in an airtight container.

Now you see why I questioned why I didn’t think of this on my own. Super easy Homemade Bread Crumbs!