Making Caesar Salad Croutons For A Barbecue

Video Transcript

"The greatest thing I think about homemade Caesar salad are the croutons. I was actually in the grocery store the other day and saw somebody reaching for one of those store made boxes of croutons and had to keep myself from going "please don't." "Please don't. I'll make you homemade ones," because they're so much better than the box kind. And they're a great way to use up "day old" bread, as you can see because I'm applying a fair amount of force to this bread. I'm actually using a rye bread today. You can do it with any bread you have, sandwich bread, baguette, ciabatta, whatever you have on hand. You want to get it into, of course, bite-size pieces. If you really want to be formal about it, you could cut off the crust, if you want to have them all exactly uniform. But I kind of like the rustic look. These are kind of nice size. This crouton recipe is really easy because a lot of them you do on the stove top and I just find that to be very finicky, prone to burning. This is just easier to pop them right in the oven. So you'll see I'm putting them into a bog. This is just I think I brought the oranges from the store home in these. And you'll see why in just a second. It's the perfect way to get your croutons all evenly coated with olive oil. Last couple, if there's any large ones there. That looks all about right. And now I'm going to drizzle with olive oil and then shake up the bag and then pop them in the oven. Put all the bread in the bag because then it'll be really, really easy to drizzle with olive oil. Just like that. The oven is finished pre-heating and I'm just going to shake it up. Take a cookie sheet, empty my croutons. You can see how they're all nicely but lightly coated in the olive oil. Put a little bit of salt and these are going to go into a 350 degree oven for about 15 minutes. It's going to depend on the kind of bread that you have as to how long you leave it in the oven, based on also how stale your bread is and also how golden you like your croutons. So I'm going to put these into the oven. "