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A Good Appetite

Left With the Crumbs? Lucky You

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Melissa Clark makes pasta with toasted garlicky bread crumbs, anchovies and fresh parsley.CreditCredit...Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Bread crumbs are easy to take for granted. In most recipes, they barely register. They’re a crunch-intensifier or a garlic-and-cheese holder (ah, stuffed mushrooms), but never the main ingredient. They may not seem like something that demands to be homemade.

But just as a loaf of really good, crusty bread — be it homemade or from an excellent bakery — makes any sliced plastic-wrapped loaf seem like cotton by comparison, homemade bread crumbs put the sawdust in the can to shame. Which is to say, it’s far better to make your own.

Homemade bread crumbs couldn’t be easier to make, and they are also basically free if you get into the habit of saving your leftover crusts.

I have a cloth sack into which I throw all the ends of my loaves. When it gets full, I make bread crumbs. The bread can sit at room temperature for days, even a few weeks before pulverizing. Repurposing hard, stale bread is the point here. And feel free to mix different kinds of loaves. It will only add complexity and dimension to the final crumbs.

Once I’ve got enough stale bread, all I do is grate it on the grating disk of my food processor. (You can also use a hand grater, though it will take a bit more muscle.) For finer crumbs, whirl the grated bread in the food processor (or blender) until it takes on the texture of sand. Another method involves pounding the stale bread with the side of a rolling pin, or even a hammer, but I’d advise wrapping the bread in a dishtowel before you begin. And if you only have fresh bread for your crumbs, dry it out in a low oven (250 degrees) first.

Then use your crumbs widely and often — in meatloaf, stuffing, dumplings, on top of casseroles and gratins, in pasta dishes.

Pasta is actually what got me thinking about bread crumbs in the first place. After marrying a man who doesn’t eat cheese, I needed a replacement for my once-ubiquitous sprinkle of grated Parmesan.

I turned to pangrattatto, an Italian garnish of bread crumbs that have been toasted in olive oil and seasoned with the likes of garlic, herbs and sometimes anchovies or chile flakes (or both). A specialty of Southern Italy, it’s dusted over pasta in place of the more costly grated cheese.

In this version of the classic recipe, I enrich the pasta with egg yolks for creaminess, Asian fish sauce to increase the funk factor and hot sauce for kick before tossing in the garlicky crumbs.

It’s an earthy, lusty dish, one that deserves the most robust, flavorful crumbs you have.

Recipe: Spaghetti With Garlicky Bread Crumbs and Anchovies

A correction was made on 
April 21, 2014

An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated the name of an Italian garnish of bread crumbs toasted in olive oil and seasoned with garlic and herbs. They are called pangrattatto, not pangritata.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Left With the Crumbs? Lucky You. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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