Bread by-products

13 Sept

This is part of our series on upcycling.

Bread is about as universal as food gets. Our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, first prepared a form of unleavened bread some 70,000 years ago from wild grains, pulses and seeds, long before the dawn of agriculture.¹ Leavened bread—where fermentation comes in—appears to have arisen in Ancient Mesopotamia.² By now, almost every culture has some form of it, however old or new, and its cultural, religious, political, financial and linguistic significance is hard to overstate.

Today, many people in industrialised Western societies tend not to value bread as highly as most societies have throughout human history. It is amongst the most wasted foods in supermarkets and homes, with approximately 900,000 tonnes wasted each year, in part due to short shelf life and overproduction. Europe is responsible for about 53% of that.³

Why? Bread is so easy not only to eat but also to reuse. Many delicious and versatile recipes already exist that can use old bread: breadcrumbs, croutons, puddings, stuffings and soups, to name just a few. It’s far too easy to use to be wasted in such quantities.

Here we present some of our culinary research into ways we can waste less bread. Some of these examples are nothing new, simply humble attempts to revive old practices that we feel could and should be much more commonplace. Elsewhere we explore the upcycling of wheat and other grain by-products, like farm by-products, and by-products of milling and brewing.

Here we present some of our culinary research into ways we can better utilise bread and its by-products:

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