Love your loaf

There’s something slightly tragic about throwing away good bread.

A lot of time, effort and, most importantly, love goes into the making of a loaf of bread. At Jolene, it starts long before it reaches the oven. We begin with a lively starter, mixing flour, water and salt. Then comes fermentation, when the dough rests and slowly develops its flavour and structure. It’s folded, shaped and left to prove before it finally goes into the oven, where the heat transforms it into the loaf we love. So finding good ways to use up every last bit of it seems like the least we can do.

There are lots of obvious ways to use up leftover bread, and it is baked into many cultures. Excuse the pun. At home we’ll turn it into croutons, make breadcrumbs for fish fingers, bread and butter pudding, or pangrattato to chuck over pasta. And pretty much all over the world, wherever people make bread, they’ve come up with great ways of using it once it’s past its best. It makes sense, really. If you’ve gone to all that trouble to make it, then why waste it?

And, conveniently, sourdough that’s slightly past its best is exactly what you want for eggy bread.

The clever French call it pain perdu, which literally means ‘lost bread’, as it was traditionally a way of using up bread that was past its best. I’ve always called it eggy bread, although when I make it for the kids at the weekend I put on an appalling French accent and announce that we’re having ‘French toast’. They absolutely love it. The accent, less so.

It’s one of those brilliantly simple things that somehow feels like much more of a treat than the effort involved. The older sourdough actually works better because it drinks up all that eggy custard beautifully. So that slightly sad-looking bit at the end of the loaf is actually perfect.

Lots of recipes for French toast call for brioche, which is obviously delicious, but I actually think sourdough works even better. That slight tanginess works really well with the sweetness of the cinnamon sugar and, for me, makes the whole thing feel more like breakfast and less like a dessert. I love how this version goes all chewy and crispy.

Eggy Bread (Serves 2 hungry people)

4 thick slices of sourdough that’s slightly past its best
3 eggs
100ml milk
Vanilla of some sort – ground or essence is fine
Big knob of salted butter

For the dusting
Caster sugar
Ground cinnamon

Crack the eggs into a bowl, add the milk and vanilla and give everything a good whisk.

Lay the slices of sourdough in a shallow dish and pour over the egg mixture. Give the bread a little time to soak it all up, turning it over so both sides get a good drink.

Get a frying pan on a medium heat and add a massive knob of salted butter. Once it’s bubbling, add the soaked bread and fry until golden brown, then flip and do the same on the other side.

If you’re going sweet, mix some caster sugar with a good pinch of cinnamon and sprinkle it generously over the eggy bread as soon as it comes out of the hot pan. The heat melts the sugar ever so slightly and it sticks to the buttery outside.

Eat it straight away as it is, with yoghurt and fruit, or we sometimes like it with some streaky smoked bacon…

Not a bad second life for the end of the loaf we love.

Big love Jolene fam

Xx