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Hello, and welcome to my ode to stale bread!
Unless you follow an extremely low carb diet, almost all of us occasionally (or frequently) end up with stale bread in our kitchens. Luckily for us, we have steam ovens to help with that.
As well as using your steam oven to freshen up a loaf or a roll, there’s actually a lot you can do with a bit of old bread so it doesn’t end up in the bin.
Enjoy the info, and definitely add today’s recipe (Spanish chicken with crispy bread, chorizo, tomatoes, olives and potatoes) to your meal planning this week or next. Every time I create a sheet pan dinner recipe it gets great feedback; I hope this will be no exception. It’s garlicky and well-seasoned, and full of texture and color. I can never get enough of the ease of one pan meals that take little time to prep and come out of the steam oven in roughly half an hour.
Happy steam oven cooking, see you here in a couple of weeks.
Emily x
PS. An update on the changes/improvements Steam Oven Insiders dashboard, for those who’ve been following along. We are hard at work behind the scenes, merging the Insiders portion of the site with the main Steam & Bake website. It’s techy and kinda boring, but the results will be exciting. In a few weeks, you’ll be able to search through ALL my content seamlessly from one place, instead of having to skip between an Insiders exclusive index and my free site index. As always, I’ll keep you posted on progress as we go.
New to Learn: What to do with stale bread
There are times you’ll have stale bread that you want to refresh so it can be eaten as normal. Fortunately, a steam oven excels at this task, and I’ll show you how I go about it below.
There’s another side to using up stale bread, though. What happens when you’ve got bread that’s beyond refreshing, but you still want to use it up rather than throw it away?
In my case, plenty! I rarely throw out stale bread because there’s so much you can do in the kitchen that turns it into a Very Useful Ingredient. Also because I do love the self-satisfied glow, aka smugness that comes with using up leftovers and foods that would otherwise get thrown out. My late Nanna would be proud.
New to Cook: Spanish Sheet Pan Chicken with Crispy Bread
I love a sheet pan dinner! Here, chicken and leftover bread get all crispy-topped and the potatoes soak up tomatoes, olives and chorizo sausage for a flavor, color and texture-packed meal that’s super easy to get onto the table.
The Season Flip
Two very delicious dishes that make use of old bread.
Southern Hemisphere
My kids love Nagi’s (Recipe Tin Eats) chicken and bacon pasta bake, and so do I because it’s got enough veg to make it a ‘proper’ meal. I make it exactly as written, a day before I want to serve it, following Nagi’s directions in the recipe notes for making ahead of time (basically, you let the sauce and pasta cool before mixing together). On the day, I set my oven to Combi Steam, 350°F/180°C, 50% (medium) steam, and heat it until it’s done. I finish with pangrattato for a textural counterpoint, and just because it’s plain delicious. My photo is terrible but it really is a great meal.
Northern Hemisphere
I know it’s the authentic, proper Italian way to make panzanella, but I get a bit weirded-out by soaked, soggy bread in a salad. The flavors can’t be beaten, though, so I loosely follow this version from Jess at Plays Well With Butter. As well as grilling or toasting the bread, I want you to turn on your oven to Combi Steam, 425°F/220°C, 30% (low) steam, and blast the dressed tomatoes for 10 minutes before mixing the salad. The hot, just-collapsed tomatoes release their juices into the dressing and even if your tomatoes weren’t the best to start with, they sure will be by the time you’ve done this.
A Thing I'm Loving
A magnetic dishcloth holder.
I love an uncluttered sink space, but I hate those freestanding plastic tubs that are meant to hold all your dishcloths, sponges and soap. They just get dirty and soapy and feel unhygienic. HAPPY SiNKS are a Finnish company who solve all sorts of kitchen annoyances like this. Their products are high quality, look great and they’ve got a solid focus on sustainable manufacturing, which I’ve started to actively seek out when I buy new products.
They’ve got all kinds of fun bits and pieces for kitchen organizing, but the thing I’m really loving is their little magnetic dishcloth holder. It gets my ever-present dishcloth off the side of the sink without it becoming stinky or moldy in the cupboard. What a win.
Ask Me Anything (AMA)
Here’s your opportunity to ask me anything you like related to combi steam cooking!
I really encourage you to submit questions, and will do my best to answer as many as possible. Though I may not be able to get to every single question, I will carefully curate ones which are relevant and represent a variety of topics. We all learn from each other, and I often learn new things based on questions from all of you!
If you have an AMA question, please email it to [email protected]. Make sure you include the phrase INSIDERS AMA in the subject line so I can collate and read all your submissions.
From Jane
Q: I am cooking your slow cooked lamb shoulder recipe and decided to do two pieces of lamb shoulder bone in as one was not enough for my family size meal. I am cooking one roast at 2.3kg and the other is 2.4kg.
I have an AEG steam pro and have placed both roasts on one AEG tray but wondered about the cook time since there is reduced space around each roast compared to if I was cooking only one roast. Each roast is close to the edge of oven with only about 7cms in the middle of the two roasts.
Should I be increasing the cook time or the temperature? I am currently cooking at 140C degrees on the medium combi steam setting.
A: The cook time and temperature will remain the same in this case; because this is a slow cooked roast, and you do still have some gaps around the edges, there’s plenty of heat and time to get around both joints of meat.
If you’re roasting something faster (say, a flattened chicken, for example), and you apply this approach of doubling up on the same tray, you may need to add a little time just to ensure even and thorough browning. But with a slow roast it’s really not necessary.
From Carolyn
Q: (In response to issue 21’s Season Flip mushroom salad idea).
Love these recipe ideas. Can you give a recipe, or ratio for the suggested dressing to go with the mushroom salad?
A: Sure thing! I tend to just throw things in and hope for the best in this instance. But at a guess, I’m using 2 parts cider vinegar, 2 parts olive oil and 1 part miso paste (white miso, usually, but if I’ve ended up with a tub of the darker stuff I just use that in a slightly lesser quantity). If you want a more European style you can swap out the miso for Dijon mustard; I find I want a little salt in the dressing when I do that, though.