Roasted Garlic Croutons/Bread Crumbs
By Tiffany Hobson
The amount of garlic you decide to use for this dish depends on two things: how much do you love garlic and how long do you want to smell like garlic! The first time I made this, I used 12 heads of roasted garlic. It took about a week for the smell to dissipate! I do love the taste of roasted garlic, and it keeps well in the refrigerator. I tend to make a lot at once and it usually lasts about a week in my house before I need to make more.
Serves: 20
Prep Time: 25 min
Cook Time: 60 min
Ingredients
Directions
1 Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Place the heads of garlic in a large Pyrex baking dish with the exposed garlic facing down. Add the vegetable broth and soak for 5-10 minutes. Turn over the garlic and cover with aluminum foil, placing parchment paper in between the garlic and foil. Cook the garlic for 1 1/2 hours, or until the garlic has become golden brown. Remove from oven and allow the garlic to cool before handling, about 10-20 minutes. At this point, you may invert the whole heads over a bowl and squeeze hard with your hands to remove as much of the roasted garlic from the cloves. Either remove as much as you need for this recipe and reserve the remaining heads whole, covered, in the refrigerator. Or squeeze all of it into a covered bowl, use what you need for this recipe and save the rest in the bowl in the refrigerator for other uses.
2 Take the bowl of cubed bread and add the squeezed out (as above) insides of 3 to 6 heads of roasted garlic. Mix the bread and garlic with your hands. You want to make sure the bread has been coated with the garlic. Place the bread on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and spread it evenly. Bake the bread, checking it every 10 minutes. Once the bread has started to turn golden brown (about 20-25 minutes), turn off the oven. Taste is the best way to see if it’s done. Bread may not be extremely hard at first, but will continue to harden as it cools.
3 For croutons: Place in a container and use when needed. For breadcrumbs: Place in a sealed zip lock bag, and place that in another sealed zip lock bag. Pound it until you have breadcrumbs.