Sarah’s Quarantine Breadcrumb Pasta, i.e. What You Should Do With All Those Weird Loaves of Bread You Baked
I know what you’re up to. You’re baking bread. You probably even started your own sourdough starter, and are using it to leaven loaves because the freaking stores are out of FREAKING yeast. Fortunately, the air has plenty.
I see you. I’m proud of you. I encourage you to keep going, BUT: I know some of your loaves have turned out kinda freaky, and with the flour shortage, none of us are in a position to just throw bread away. You need to make it into food that you’ll actually eat. Fortunately, my friend Sarah is here to help.
And the answer is pasta. Made from your weird bread.
My friend Sarah is the pasta-maker at Luce in Portland. She’s one of my favorite people to geek out about food with, and has the brain and energy to do so for 8 hours at a time (yes. We’ve gone out drinking, eating and chatting about food for the better part of the daylight before and WE’RE. NOT. SORRY.) Since she, like nearly every culinarian in Portland, is out of a job for the moment, I was able to trade her some sourdough starter for some of her genius recipe innovation. I got a good deal.
“This recipe was based on the idea of a dumpling (pisarei) in Northern Italy, specifically a town called Piacenza, that is made from stale or leftover bread that was ground into flour and used to make the dough, which is then formed into dumplings and served with beans (faso).” Sarah told me. “Pisarei e faso is a dish that makes the most out of what you have and, during quarantine, I found that I was lacking in pantry items and abundant in time and bread.”
The idea is to take dried out bread, use a food processor to make it into breadcrumbs, then use those crumbs as the basis for your noodles, instead of flour.
“If the bread is fresh and you just want to make these noodles,” Sarah explained to me “dice up the bread and toast it in the oven until crispy.” Let it cool, “then throw the toast into a food processor and blend until there is about a 70/30 ratio of pulverized insides to crusty chunks.” Got that?
Pulverized insides:crusty chunks is 70:30.
You don’t even need to obsess about getting the crumbs super fine and uniform – part of the flavor of this pasta comes from some bits being darker, and lighter, and Sarah gives instruction on how to carefully handle the dough so the crusty bits don’t pierce through the structure of the noodle.
This dough is surprisingly flexible and can be used for a number of different noodle styles, but for now we give instructions for making gnocchi and tagliatelle. DO be patient and gentle with the dough, however. Even though the crusty bits soften during the hydration step, they still can puncture or tear the noodle. You’ll get the hang of working with the noodle soon enough – just give yourself a little extra time to figure it out.
“When making this dough,” Sarah warned me, “you’re going to think I lead you astray and this dough won’t work. But it does, and you’ll be rewarded with either gnocchi dumplings or tagliatelle that taste like toast, and you’ll want to make cheese sauce for those gnocchi and eat it right away.”
“It tastes like a goddamn grilled cheese,” she told me, after eating her cheesy gnocchi. “That is the real prize from my experiment today. Pasta grilled cheese.”
For the tagliatelle style noodle, I recommend a light sauce, like a nutty herb pesto, or chili oil and (yes) even more toasted bread crumbs.
Sarah’s Bread Crumb Pasta, for gnocchi or tagliatelle
Equipment
- Gnocchi board, if making gnocchi dumplings
- Pasta roller, if making tagliatelle
- Large pot for cooking pasta
Ingredients
- 200 grams finely(ish) ground bread crumbs about 3 cups, loosely packed
- 2 eggs
- 40 grams water about 3 T + 1 tsp
Instructions
- Put breadcrumbs in large bowl. Make well in center of dough, and crack egg into well. Add water, and mix until fully combined.
- The dough itself is going to be very sandy and when you are trying to form it into a ball it will crack and crumble and generally not do anything that a typical pasta dough should do. Don’t be deterred. Gently pack it into as much of a ball as you can and leave it to rest, covered or in plastic wrap for (at the very least) 30 minutes. The breadcrumbs take much longer than normal much finer ground flour to hydrate
- Now that the dough has had time to rest, something magical has happened! The dough will become much more pliable, but not pliable in the sense of normal pasta dough though. You will still need to be a wee bit gentle with it while handling it. Put a pot of salted water on the stove, and get ready to shape the dough either into gnocchi or tagliatelle (once the noodles are shaped, you can cook them immediately.)
Shape the dough into gnocchi:
- Tear off a marble-sized piece of the dough, and gently roll it into a rough ball.
- Using steady but gentle pressure, roll it down the length of the gnocchi board. It might take a sec to get the hang of rolling this kind of dough on a gnocchi board – it's slightly more fragile than usual pasta dough. Continue with rest of dough until all of gnocchi is shaped. If you have a buddy to help you, it goes a little faster to have one person portion and roll dough into a ball, and another person work the dough on the gnocchi board.
- Once all dough is shaped, cook gnocchi is boiling salted water. Finish with a rich cheese sauce of your choice, or simply olive oil and fresh cracked pepper.
Shape the dough into tagliatelle:
- Set up your pasta roller.
- Portion dough into quarters. Keep one to work with, and wrap the rest in plastic to avoid them from drying out.
- Take your working dough, and smash it gently with your palm. Using either your gentle fingers, or a small rolling pin, form dough into a small medallion.
- Run dough through thickest setting on your pasta machine at least three times. Take your time with this.
- Start working the dough on the thinner settings, running it at least twice through each setting before working your way down to the next. When you get to the 2nd thinnest setting, fold dough into thirds, and repeat the whole process again, starting on the thickest setting. Helpful trick: this time running the dough through, make sure the folded edges are east and west and the frayed edges are north and south so you get straighter more uniform noodles when cutting.
- Work the dough down again to the 2nd thinnest setting. It's okay that these noodles are a little thicker than normal – they're fun to eat when they're a little thicker and you can enjoy the texture and flavor of the crusty bread.
- Using a sharp knife, cut sheeted dough into 3/4" thick strips. Cook your tagliatelle in a pot of boiling, salted water. Finish with parmesan and a sauce of your choice – a light tomato, or a nutty herb pesto, or a chili oil is excellent with these.
