Only if you are a level 99 necrobaker
Despite the doubts on here, theres actually a bakery that grinds down day old bread and reuses it on their next day batch. They say it gives it a good taste. Atleast according to a video i saw and logically it makes sense.
The idea is to use some of it while using flour rather than replacing flour otherwise you will make condensed hard bread.
My local bakery does this with sourdough. The recycled sourdough loaves are SUPER tangy, like tang-for-days levels. It’s great.
That sounds awful. I think tangy sourdough bread is disgusting (which is one of the reasons I hated living in eastern Germany).
The taste is good. Almost as if you baked it over a wood fire.
I make bread several times per month. I have probably “recycled” around 20.
i did this! yes.
How was it?
pretty rough and crumbly and crappy.
it was impossible with the kitchen tools I had on hand to grind it into a fine enough flour to my liking, I just had a generic blender, but my whole reasoning for the experiment was “i bet I could make bread out of bread.”
and it was moderately successful in that regard. what emerged was properly identified as bread.
although I chucked most of the loaf in the trash because that was its flavor profile.
So a regular blender wasnt enough, hmmm. We need to get the NileRed of baking on this. I want video evidence now that you’ve given us the proof of concept.
Someone call Joshua Weissman
I feel like you should have included some of the caveats in your original comment!
i was pretty lazy about it, I’d like to see the results of other breadsperiments.
Not really, no - entropy is one-way at the macro scale.
The flour absorbed water, and combined with kneading, produced gluten (and was baked, causing more chemical changes).
Grinding it all up wouldn’t reverse that process - it would just be ground up bread.
Breadcrumbs. Panko if fortunate.
Or croutons.
With enough energy you certainly could, even if that meant breaking everything down to their constituent parts chemically and doing stuff like reconstructing proteins from amino acids. This isn’t reversing entropy but you could get back to the original ingredients, with some Ship of Theseus stuff happening with the matter involved.
There is something similar but not quite. Masa is made from nixtamalized corn, but the process to make fresh masa means pulverizing the moist kernels into a dough. Then, to store for later use, the dough can be dried and ground into a flour: masa harina (literally “dough flour”).
There is probably a law of diminishing returns in here because bread contains other ingredients as well (salt, yeast, etc.) and after a while the chemistry of baking will be out of whack.
I’ve heard of some bakery somewhere doing “recycled bread”, where they supposedly take the leftover bread that didn’t sell that day, dry it out, grind it up, and mix it with fresh flour to make new bread, but I don’t know for sure if the story is real.
If a real thing in Mexican bakeries. They’ll take all the stale pan dulce, waiting till they become very dry, and grind them into a flour, or fine chunks depending on the bakery, and mix them in with fresh dough to create a cinnamon flavor pastry called a “piedra”, or rock in English. They have the texture of a scone. They’re pretty good. my dad loves them.
TIL
Its a real thing, there’s a term for it if i can find it.
Edit; Pate Fermentee, or “old dough”, setting aside a hunk of dough from todays batch to mix into tomorrows for extra flavor
Theres also a method called a “soaker”, using stale bread in water, breaking it down, and remixing it into a new dough
That’s somewhat different. They aren’t taking stale bread and reusing it to make new bread, but rather a portion of the raw dough from a previous batch is saved and added to fresh dough. It’s meant to add a bit of fermented flavor, without quite being a sourdough. It’s more in line with preferments like poolish and biga.
It’s common in Germany
Actually I know somebody who makes cake out of it.
Not without other ingredients. The flour has undergone an irreversible change.
Binging with babyish on YouTube tried this not long ago when trying to make cheeseburger pizza or something. It wasn’t great
During COVID lockdown I had plenty of yeast but very little flour, so I bulked it out with about half Matzo meal, which isn’t breadcrumbs but the flour has been cooked. It wasn’t great, but it loafed enough to slice and make sandwiches or toast.
Yeah but the texture would probably suck
If the bread is just stale you can restore it by wetting it and heating in an oven or microwave.
Partially restore it. At best, you put about 60% of the water into the starch crystals that the bread had when it was fresh. It’s a massive improvement, but it’s not hard to tell which is which in a side-by-side comparison.
I haven’t tried it. I can only assume you won’t get much gluten development. It might be more crumbly and dense, like cornbread, I would think.
The gluten does not come back if u pulverize it. You’ll likely end up someone terrible.
Edit: I sometimes forget to proofread “some things”
