Home & Lifestyle, Food

Dry Bread: Sourdough Wheat & Rye Granola

Apollonia Poilâne

Lesson time 09:16 min

Swapping oats for dried bread, Apollonia introduces an innovative riff on granola, a great use for loaves that are no longer fresh.

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Topics include: Sourdough Wheat & Rye Granola

Preview

[MUSIC PLAYING] APOLLONIA POILANE: In this granola recipe, we have plain wheat sourdough loaf, rye bread. You have puffed rice. You have honey. You have nuts. These are grains that have been soaked and cooked by the honey. The texture is much tighter, but lighter than traditional granola recipes, because I don't use any oil in it. I really view this as a recipe to turn the leftovers of your pantry into something really fabulous for breakfast or for a 4:00 PM snack. Many, many moons ago, I read an article on how to bake granola in "The New York Times." And that recipe called for different cereal grain flakes. And I had a little bit of stale bread at home. And I thought, there isn't that much of a difference between breadcrumb and grain flakes. So I started experimenting, really testing the limits of, how can you work a bread granola in a different way? How can you enrich that recipe? How can you make it your own? And I would encourage you, while I'm doing a very purist recipe here and using just plain wheat and rye sourdough loaves, to explore adding different nuts, different dried fruit. It really is about your personal blend and also the ingredients you have at hand. This recipe allows you to not waste the leftover bread. You can tell when bread is dry when you cut through it and your knife is having a hard time. You'll notice these big cracks. If you can't break it in your hand so easily, that's a sense of dryness that a lot of people would take for bread to be discarded. I view it as the opportunity to use bread as an ingredient. In this recipe, we have wheat sourdough loaf, some rye bread, some almonds and some hazelnuts, puffed rice. We have a little bit of salt and honey. The fruit and yogurt are for tasting. So for this recipe, I cut the bread to make the food processors work easier. Do watch out for your hands. This is typically a moment where the knife tends to slip. Here, I'm demonstrating this using both the wheat and the rye. The rye loaf tends to be a little coarser. So cut it into thinner pieces. Say you want to make a batch of just granola. And you only have fresh bread. In that case, cut the bread in slices and dry them out. Because the food processor will have a really hard time breaking down big chunks of bread into small pieces. So I'll start off with a low speed and then just work up a faster speed as I need it. You can use the pulsing. It really depends on your blender. And you need a good blender for this one. I've blended it for exactly 2 seconds here. And I'm getting a little bit of crumb. I still have big pieces. Once I see how it reacts, then I can move into faster speeds. Now, if you have a blender that's really crummy-- pun intended-- you could just remove this, use a bowl, sort through the bigger pieces, and start over again with the larger pieces in there. Perfect. All right, so we have pieces here of very different sizes. We have the one that really looks like breadcrumb. The larg...

About the Instructor

As a third-generation baker and CEO of the renowned Parisian bakery Poilâne, Apollonia Poilâne keeps time-honored traditions alive with every loaf. Now she’s sharing the joy of making bread from scratch with her recipes and hands-on demonstrations. Learn how to make your own starter and a variety of French breads, including rustic wheat, rye, and brioche. Taste, smell, and feel your way to fresh, warm bread at home.

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Apollonia Poilâne

Poilâne CEO Apollonia Poilâne teaches the renowned Parisian bakery’s philosophy and time-tested techniques for baking rustic French breads.

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