Homemade garlic croûtons

Lately I decided to stop buying one of the three things I eat most often and make them myself.
The idea was to reduce the amount of waste.

One of them is garlic croûton. I like to eat "light" in the evening, especially when I have to get up early (eating beaf doesn't help falling asleep for exemple). I often have a corn and cumcumber salad which I like to eat with croûtons, otherwise it's boring :)

But as I eat this dish quite often, I used to buy a lot of croûtons. I had to choose between croûtons emported from the US and overpacked european croûtons, which were, on the top of that, not particularly tasty.

Now I make them myself, every two or three weeks. That's very easy, that's cheap, and they're delicious :)

The first recipe I tried requested half a baguette, 6 garlic cloves, herbs and 50 cl olive oil, which is waaaaaay too much.
The idea was to squeeze the garlic to bring out the taste as much as possible and mix it with oil. Quite a lot of work the first time BUT... I didn't want to throw what was left of the garlic afterwards so I put everything back in the bottle of oil, with the oil I didn't use.

So my first advice is to simply, very easily macerate garlic (and herbs) in olive oil (cut in small pieces, pour into a bottle of oil, wait, that's it). I gave you the first recipe so you have an idea of the proportions but I poured new oil in my bottle yesterday and the taste is already/still here. Basically you can make a lot of croûtons with the same cloves. You can of course use the garlic oil for other purpose, it tastes delicious!

It is very cheap to make because you can use old bread, you know, the very hard one you were not going to eat anyway. So stop throwing it and save it for when you want to bake croûtons.

My recipe

- half a loaf, more or less

- 10-13 cl of garlic/olive oil

Cut the bread in small squares.

Pour the oil, mix with a spoon.

Pour the oil, mix with a spoon. I recommend to wait here, and to mix regularly. You may have the impression that you didn't use enough oil but give it the time to soak the bread.

About 15 mn at 180 ° C and it's ready!

10 cl is just enough, you don't need to soak the extra oil afterwards, I put slightly more on this picture.

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