If you have some stale bread, enjoy shopping in the markdown bread aisle or, like me, were blessed with 20 loaves of day old bread and want some way to prolong it’s life, instead of just tossing it in the waste bin, you have come to the right place! The more bread you have, the better your upcycling will be, but it is really easy to get two items for the price of none!

Set your oven for 350 degrees  then take your bread and lay them in a single layer on a cookie sheet. If your oven can fit multiple cookie sheets, that’s even better, as you will need some room and time to get this done. Place your bread in the oven for about 10 minutes. I generally have to have mine in for about 20 minutes, because our oven works in strange ways. You can figure out the time needed by checking on it now and then, you want your bread as hard as you can get it without actually burning it, but don’t worry if you have some blackened slices. Go ahead and poke your bread when you think it is ready and make sure it isn’t spongy at all.

Once my bread has become hard and crispy, I let it cool (usually while putting more bread in the oven) and then place it back in the bags they came from, twist tie it and run my rolling pin over it until I don’t think it can take it anymore. Once it is as fine as I think I can get it, I then sift it through a metal colander and end up with both bread crumbs and stuffing! You can add your spices now or when you go to use them. We like to add the spices when we use them, so we can change it up a bit. You can also do this in a food processor, but you won’t get any stuffing mix that way and doing it by hand really doesn’t take that much time or effort.

Repeat the process until all of your bread has been upcycled into bread crumbs and/or stuffing mix, then find some clean containers to store them in for later use. I don’t know why I never thought of this before, I let so much bread go to waste and that makes me sad. If upcycling your bread isn’t your thing, you could always save it for the wildlife, at least it won’t get wasted that way.