Cooking With Bread

Many view bread as an accompanying side with most meals. In my mind, a fresh, quality baguette is fine all by itself, though I won’t complain if there is a little French cheese to go along with it. Bread, however is more than just a side. It can be used as a central ingredient for such things as bread sauce, panzanella, bread pudding, and pangrattato. Recently, I have implemented a technique on Mario Batali’s show, Molto Mario on the Fine Living Network (I went through a big Batali phase after reading Heat by Bill Buford). Batali, if nothing else, strives for extreme adherence to traditional Italian cooking. He notes that we, Americans or Italian Americans, are an affluent bunch. As such, we have adapted traditional recipes to reflect our wealth. Meatballs became an all meat affair, with a little seasoning thrown in for good measure. Batali, however, reminds his viewers that many Italians did not have enough money to purchase enough meat for such a meatball. Accordingly, Italians would take some day-old bread and soak it in some water, ring it out, and add it to the meat mixture. This would provide a cheap, plentiful additive, as well as add some much needed moisture. An all meat meatball is rather dry. Sure, you will see recipes calling for such things as adding an egg and then bread crumbs, but the wet bread makes the meatballs so moist. The whole idea of this seems to sound unappetizing, but I’ve gotten some really good comments from Melanie about the meatballs and meatloaf (plus I also thought that it tastes great). Now, Mario never gave measurements for how much wet bread he would add to his dishes, so when I made the meatballs, they were a little too wet. This means that they broke up a bit when cooking, which is not such a big deal because you will cut up the meatballs before eating anyways. I put three moderately thick slice of a baguette that I purchased. When I made the meatloaf, I added two slices of some homemade bread. Even though the meatballs failed to keep their shape, they were still delicious (which is all that really matters in the end). So when you have some stale bread don’t throw it out, use it in some meatloaf or meatballs (or panzanella, or bread pudding, or…).