Thickening with bread - a ramble

"Where there is stale bread there is home." Juls' Kitchen

This was going to be a blog about the different ways you can thicken things. I got as far as making a list but pretty soon realised that each of those thickening methods was worthy of a post of its own.

So I decided to start with bread - well it is the most ancient method and the most ancient manufactured ingredient probably - although maybe cheese might have beaten it. And so I started rambling around the net in my usual haphazard way and was blessed with also finding some websites worth looking into, so they were duly noted in my little notebook for a post of their own.

But what about bread? I confess I began with soup - and a particular soup at that - one from my youth and Elizabeth David. Not this one which is Brotsuppe - Bavarian bread soup from a website called Juls' Kitchen - one of those added to my list. Her quote at the the head of this post is apparently a paraphrase of a Barilla advertisement, but I thought it really summed up the fundamental nature of bread, as well as soup - which soon emerged as the prime use for bread as a thickener. So everyday. So homely. So practical - tasty and comforting to boot.

"Any leftover bread – the most precious, common, dignified, widespread, meaningful and revered food in human history – is upcycled into something else in the frugal economy of traditional households. These recipes fight food waste, nourish, surprise with their ingenuity. Stale bread brings to life recipes imbued with family traditions and habits, influenced by climate and local products, dominations, personal stories, and rituals." Juls' Kitchen

And this particular soup is, in fact one of the most basic in the world of bread soups, since the other ingredients are just meat stock, with a touch of onion and garlic. Mind you it also includes egg yolks, and cream which are two of the other thickeners I shall talk about in future posts. Which means, I guess, that it is even more of a suitable starting point, for the surprising perhaps, variety of bread soups. Juls - I imagine that's her in the picture - is based in Italy, but even in that one country, where you are will change the nature of the soup:

"Just have a spoonful, and these soups place you precisely in a specific land: rye bread in Valle d’Aosta; dense, durum wheat bread in the south of Italy; cheese, butter and cream in the Alps; bland bread without salt in Tuscany. Garlic, oil, cherry tomatoes and anchovies, on the other hand, state a markedly Mediterranean character." Juls' Kitchen

Which brings me to my next website discovery - Saltshaker - whose author, like me, invents projects to keep up the inspiration, and one of his/her projects is The bread and soup project - which so far seems to have covered 64 countries, as his/her map shows, in his/her search for national bread based soups. Which was not always successful. Take Australia which he/she begins with: "it seems that Australia, as a whole, just isn’t all that into soup." which probably means that there are a number of other countries which at least aren't into bread soups. And incidentally that's probably correct as far as Australia goes. He/she thought that the closest that Australia came to a national soup was a very plain pumpkin soup. Discuss ...

Before I get on to a few specific soups, I should just say that there are a number of ways that bread is used in relation to soup. There are the oh so fashionable croutons that float on the top and which are not really thickeners and in similar vein there are the floating slices of toast on top - often with cheese on top - of which the prime examples - well the ones that I know about - are French onion soup and Provençal fish soup with rouille. Which I adore.

Elizabeth David did not approve:

"The onion soup generally regarded as 'French', with sodden bread, strings of cheese, and half-cooked onion floating about in it, seems to me a good deal overrated and rather indigestible."

Although elsewhere she does mention the tradition of placing a stale piece of bread in your soup bowl and then pouring the soup on top. Which would probably thicken the soup as it breaks down into mush.

However, in her book French Provincial Cooking she has a recipe for Potage aux champignons à la bressane which uses bread to thicken the soup. Several bloggers have made this - to acclaim, although time has moved on since Elizabeth's day and we can now plunge a stick blender into the pot to do the final puréeing. Elizabeth used a mouli - and the coarse blade at that - although she did rather grudgingly say you could use a liquidizer. I think she preferred the mouli though because she says:

"you will not get the thick or smooth purée usually associated with mushroom soup, but rather a mixture of the consistency of cream broken by all the miniscule particles of the mushrooms."

I found a few bloggers who had tried this soup - the picture is from Liberty London Girl who says of it:

"If asked to come up with the menu for my final meal, this soup would be a strong contender for the first course. It’s intensely mushroomy, and is a pleasing proper mushroom grey colour, flecked with black mushroom gills. When left overnight it thickens considerably and makes a rather good sauce for chicken." Liberty London Girl

And Jane Grigson too, who features in her book The Mushroom Feast, also says:

"It's difficult to choose between the different mushroom soups - obviously one uses the recipe which coincides with the contents of the store cupboard - but for flavour, I think this is the best."

I concur. I made this a few times in days gone by as you can see from the yellowing and disintegrating page from my copy of Elizabeth's book - the whole book is falling apart as well. I'm not really a huge fan of mushroom soup, but this one is really tasty.

Then of course it's back to the Italians and Tuscany in particular for their now world famous Ribollita and Pappa al pomodoro. On the left is Felicity Cloake's summary of and recipe for Ribollita of which she quotes Alastair Little as saying: "Much complicated nonsense is talked about this Tuscan soup” - traditionally apparently "made from leftover minestrone and stale bread." Today it's made from scratch of course. Pappa al pomodoro - in this case from The Mediterranean Dish is rather more tomato focussed. In ribollita it's greens and beans.

And speaking of greens and beans, I had thought that another French soup - Garbure which features cabbage, ham and beans from the Pyrenees, also used bread as a thickener - and maybe in some versions it does, but no - it's usually just a piece of bread in the dish, or floating on top, or in posher versions of a fundamentally peasant dish, as this one from Guillaume Brahimi - on the SBS website - croutons are used as the finishing touch, not as a vital ingredient. The soup is thick enough on its own, and really doesn't need extra thickening. It's designed, nay required, to be one of those soups in which you can stand up a spoon.

Going back to Italy my trip around Italian bread soups actually began with Zuppa Arcidossana. I found the recipe on another, now noted, website called Kate in the Kitchen. I found the recipe there, because as another blogger who had made it said, that the original recipe by Mark Bittman is hidden behind The New York Times paywall. This time I couldn't even find the NYT picture on their website although it did turn up in Google Images. Their version on the left, Kate's on the right. And I have to say that the NYT version looks more like a stew than a soup. It's also from Tuscany - from the town of Arcidossana - hence its name, but it doesn't appear to be very well known. In fact the only versions I found were related to Mark Bittman's version, so maybe he made it up - based on ribollita?

I am sure there are other bread based soups, but I will end this little section on Gazpacho - the Spanish cold tomato soup that is so popular on foodie newsletters in the summer. The version of Courgette and almond gazpacho shown here is from José Pizarro on The Guardian website. No tomatoes, because, of course there were none, way back then:

"Long before tomatoes arrived from the Americas, it was made with bread, garlic, olive oil and almonds, which have always been part of our food culture. It began as field food, crushed by hand in mortars and eaten by workers under the sun with nothing but stale bread and whatever else they had to hand alongside. No blenders, no chill time, just instinct and hunger. This version, with courgette and basil, goes back to that idea: take what’s around you and make something good out of it. Simple roots, but full of life." José Pizarro

As I think I said near the beginning of this ramble, which has been really entertaining, mostly because of the discovery of those 'new to me' websites, this was meant to be about thickening things, but ended up being about soup. However, bread does also play a role in sauces, and probably stews as well looking at that NYT Zuppa Arcidossana - well a stew is really a thick soup isn't it? It's a fine line sometimes.

So sauces - I found two, but there are probably lots more. The first is Bread sauce - Gil Meller of River Cottage's version is shown here. It includes cream - another of the thickeners. And I have written about bread sauce before - well I'm British and it's such an unexpectedly delicious thing. Sounds awful, doesn't look all that great, but we British love it - especially at Christmas time. I mean fundamentally it's just breadcrumbs, cream, milk, butter and few flavourings. One of those simple treasures. We used to have it as part of the Christmas spread, but, you know, I don't think I have eaten it at all since childhood. I should try it again some time. Gil Meller suggests serving it with roast chicken.

And last of all at the other end of the flavour spectrum - Romesco sauce this one from Daniel Gritzer of Serious Eats who gives a comprehensive rundown on what it is, what it was and what it has become. It's Spanish - well Catalonian - I think Catalonia is still trying to secede from Spain - and:

"Its base ingredients usually include nuts—often almonds and/or hazelnuts—tomatoes, dried peppers, garlic, bread, olive oil, and vinegar, all mashed or processed into a paste." Daniel Gritzer/Serious Eats

A paste with a multitude of uses, and which has been modified and varied ad infinitum. But yes - always bread as the thickener.

And right at the end - just now in fact - I found that another way to thicken your soup with bread is to soak your bread in some milk or cream, purée it and then add it to your soup. I guess it might be best to add some of the soup to your bread purée, mix and then pour into your soup. to keep it smooth. However Kitchn who ran a test on various ways to thicken a soup, only gave this method 4 out of 10 and said:

"Even though the bread had been blended smoothly, once it was added to the soup and simmered, it hydrated into little bits and strands, giving the broth a cloudy, curdled appearance. The soup did thicken slightly, but it took an entire slice to make any impact, and the final result was a liquid with some extra body and heft, but ultimately still thinner than desired."

Their top method - beurre manié. Butter - that's another thickener post to come.

Bread - such a basic thing - which takes an infinite number of forms and is used in so many different ways. I didn't mention flatbreads here. I suspect that's a whole other world.

POSTSCRIPT

To last night's Chicken and cauliflower - and yes I should have taken a photo but I didn't, even though David suggested I should. It was really nice in a supreme comfort sort of way. Creamy and subtle. I suppose some would say bland, but I think that would not be fair. It had more taste than that. I would cook it again. The spinach was vital I think.

YEARS GONE BY

August 29

2024 - Can you do anything with leftover frittata? - not really I seem to have concluded

2023 - A guru in retro fancy mode

2022 - The guilty satisfaction of empty things

2021 - Glamorous cakes you could try

2020 - Missing

2019 - Luxury escaping

2018 - The comfort of a hot beverage

2017 - Chips (not crisps)

2016 - Burnt offerings