Using BREAD to thicken soups & stews

Cafe Society
1

I’m browning some beef tonight to make pot roast tomorrow. I have some stale leftover bread sitting around and wanted to use it to thicken the sauce. Should I add it at the beginning? I usually cook the meat for about four hours, with half the veggies at the beginning - so they break down into a thick saucy coating - and half the veggies at the halfway mark or thereabouts. Would that much cooking time break the bread down into nothing? Should I add the bread in small pieces, or are whole slices OK? Do I need to puree the bread with some of the broth or will it break down on its own?

Never used bread to thicken anything before, so I want to get it right on the first try! :slight_smile: Thanks.

2

Bread crumbs work really well - let the bread dry out and then food process it. It’ll just go ‘poof’ in the soup.

3

The bread will never break down into nothing. It will break down, but into starches and such, which is exactly what you want for thickening the stew.

4

Will it be lumpy if I don’t process the (very hard, dried-out) slices like Johnny Braco told me to do?

5

Soak in a liquid to soften, blend into a purée and add to the soup.

6

To be safe, take the bread, take some of the liquid of your stew, put it in a blender, and reincorporate the broken down mixture into the soup/stew.

That said, I think it should be able to break down in that time. I make carbonnade quite often, which is a beef stew braised in beer that you cover with mustard-smeared bread, and the bread breaks down fine. Now, I’ve never tried it with very hard, dried-out slices, but I suspect they will rehydrate in the stew and break down. If you have any doubts, just go the blender route.

7

I wouldn’t hit it with a blender after it’s rehydrated. That might break down the starches too much. What I’d do is pulverize the dried bread into fine crumbs, then strain out a good amount of your cooking liquid and add the crumbs to it over medium heat, and whisk. It should turn into a nice slurry that you could then add back to your main mix.

8

Well, I thought about it, and I decided that I wouldn’t at all mind if there were bits of bread still floating, so I added about four or five good-sized chunks of crusty, toasted bread when I first started simmering the meat.

By the time it was done (about 4 hrs later - low heat in the oven) the bread had completely dissolved, so if anyone out there is peeking and wants to know, that was my result. It had the side benefit of handling something I do every single time I make pot roast, which is to forget to flour the meat until long after I’ve browned it. Not a problem this time! :smiley:

9

Good to know! That’s what I thought would happen, but didn’t want to speak authoritatively about, as I’ve never tried it with dried out bread.