We have an ongoing problem with bread at the wine and cheese shop where I work. Enough customers want it and buy it to make it worth our while to carry it, but we have to carry a quality product, and we can only get that from a bakery some distance away. They deliver, but they only deliver in quanbreasty, and we frequently have bread leftover. We end up throwing away a lot of stale bread. We'd like to order less, but then they wouldn't deliver. We could order from another bakery, but their bread isn't as good so we'd sell still less. We could order every other day, but then it wouldn't be fresh. You get the idea.
The other day my boss had another idea: What if we made gourmet bread crumbs? He asked how to make bread crumbs. My co-worker and I agreed that it was a simple matter of breaking up the bread in a blender, adding some dried herbs like basil and oregano, and spinning the blender. I said we should toast the bread first; she said we didn't even have to do that.
Two problems: First, we're not sure if our customers are in the market for gourmet bread crumbs, but even beyond that, we're thinking the bread crumbs would go bad. At home, I keep them in my freezer. If I don't, they go moldy like any bread. At which point my boss asked about the bread crumbs you buy in the store. What keeps them from getting moldy? Good question, so I thought I'd ask all of you. Is it a matter of a preservative that we could put in them? Or could we dry them enough in the oven and sell them in a sealed container such that the mold wouldn't be interested?
salted" honeyIs there a way to tell whether or not a store-bought bottle of honey was made from bees who were feed granulated sugar, as opposed to...
--Lia
