Only if you are a level 99 necrobaker
this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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Despite the doubts on here, theres actually a bakery that grinds down day old bread and reuses it on their next day batch. They say it gives it a good taste. Atleast according to a video i saw and logically it makes sense.
The idea is to use some of it while using flour rather than replacing flour otherwise you will make condensed hard bread.
My local bakery does this with sourdough. The recycled sourdough loaves are SUPER tangy, like tang-for-days levels. It's great.
The taste is good. Almost as if you baked it over a wood fire.
I make bread several times per month. I have probably "recycled" around 20.
Ehhhhh, no, not unless you really want to fuck around with the meaning of "bread".
The end result of baking bread isn't just flour with air in it.
The proteins change, the starches change, and you can't just undo that by grinding the bread. I would say that anything that would undo those changes would essentially be making something else entirely, but it definitely isn't going to be ingredients that v AC c be fermented and turned into anything resembling bread anyway.
Now, you can make loafs out of ground up bread. You can essentially grind up damn near anything edible and mix it with binders, then make it loaf shaped and bake it though. If you want to get frisky, bread pudding is just using bread to make a loaf of something. Meat loaf ain't bread, but it's the same basic idea as bread pudding (again, if you want to fuck with word meanings).
But there are more things than bread pudding you can turn bread into. They're all similar, because there's only so many binders that are edible in the first place. But they'll have different textures than bread pudding, and pretty much any flavors you want to try.
But bread, even if you deal with things that aren't wheat, you're causing chemical changes at such a level that there's no way to turn it back into something that will perform the same as flour
The meaning of bread is pretty loose as it is, especially internationally.
To be fair, you can unboil an egg. So I'm not sure how it would taste, and I'm not aware of it ever being done, but I'd hesitate to say it's impossible
I had to look that up, and it's pretty cool, but what you're getting back wouldn't work right as an ingredient, except in some edge cases maybe. Plus, nothing I found indicated that the urea was for sure removed, which would interfere with cooking. I also didn't see anything about the fats and what kind of shape they're in.
It's also not the same thing because that's a chemical change, not grinding the egg up. Which you can do to bread too, but what your get back isn't flour at all.
Assuming that you could use the same basic idea with bread, what you'd get is a slurry of gluten, and broken down starches. There's stuff that could maybe be done with that, but not making bread for sure. For one thing, the yeasts consumed the sugars, converted it to gas and alcohol, most of which evaporates out by the time you slice bread. So the process is dead in the water at the start. You'd have to add back that stuff in a form that could be fermented, and that's basically just going to be flour.
Tbh, saying that the process I saw is unboiling an egg is journalists licence at best, click bait bullshit at worst, like the whole dire wolf thing that's been making rounds lately. Yeah, if you want to pretend that "unboiling" means something other than what the obvious assumption is going to be, that's great. But the process doesn't actually return the eggs did the state they were before. Pretty close, since egg proteins are relatively simple, but it isn't like what you're getting is the same thing as if you whipped up eggs in a bowl, which is what "unboiling" would mean to most people (and that's the main complaint I saw on videos and articles).
The people that cooked it up (heh) even said that it's more about being able to clean gear and get a partial return of the proteins for reuse, with the key word being partial.
i did this! yes.
How was it?
pretty rough and crumbly and crappy.
it was impossible with the kitchen tools I had on hand to grind it into a fine enough flour to my liking, I just had a generic blender, but my whole reasoning for the experiment was "i bet I could make bread out of bread."
and it was moderately successful in that regard. what emerged was properly identified as bread.
although I chucked most of the loaf in the trash because that was its flavor profile.
So a regular blender wasnt enough, hmmm. We need to get the NileRed of baking on this. I want video evidence now that you've given us the proof of concept.
Someone call Joshua Weissman
I feel like you should have included some of the caveats in your original comment!
i was pretty lazy about it, I'd like to see the results of other breadsperiments.
During COVID lockdown I had plenty of yeast but very little flour, so I bulked it out with about half Matzo meal, which isn't breadcrumbs but the flour has been cooked. It wasn't great, but it loafed enough to slice and make sandwiches or toast.
There is something similar but not quite. Masa is made from nixtamalized corn, but the process to make fresh masa means pulverizing the moist kernels into a dough. Then, to store for later use, the dough can be dried and ground into a flour: masa harina (literally “dough flour”).
Not really, no - entropy is one-way at the macro scale.
The flour absorbed water, and combined with kneading, produced gluten (and was baked, causing more chemical changes).
Grinding it all up wouldn't reverse that process - it would just be ground up bread.
Breadcrumbs. Panko if fortunate.
Or croutons.
With enough energy you certainly could, even if that meant breaking everything down to their constituent parts chemically and doing stuff like reconstructing proteins from amino acids. This isn’t reversing entropy but you could get back to the original ingredients, with some Ship of Theseus stuff happening with the matter involved.
There is probably a law of diminishing returns in here because bread contains other ingredients as well (salt, yeast, etc.) and after a while the chemistry of baking will be out of whack.
I've heard of some bakery somewhere doing "recycled bread", where they supposedly take the leftover bread that didn't sell that day, dry it out, grind it up, and mix it with fresh flour to make new bread, but I don't know for sure if the story is real.
It's common in Germany
If a real thing in Mexican bakeries. They'll take all the stale pan dulce, waiting till they become very dry, and grind them into a flour, or fine chunks depending on the bakery, and mix them in with fresh dough to create a cinnamon flavor pastry called a "piedra", or rock in English. They have the texture of a scone. They're pretty good. my dad loves them.
TIL
Its a real thing, there's a term for it if i can find it.
Edit; Pate Fermentee, or "old dough", setting aside a hunk of dough from todays batch to mix into tomorrows for extra flavor
Theres also a method called a "soaker", using stale bread in water, breaking it down, and remixing it into a new dough
That's somewhat different. They aren't taking stale bread and reusing it to make new bread, but rather a portion of the raw dough from a previous batch is saved and added to fresh dough. It's meant to add a bit of fermented flavor, without quite being a sourdough. It's more in line with preferments like poolish and biga.
Actually I know somebody who makes cake out of it.
Binging with babyish on YouTube tried this not long ago when trying to make cheeseburger pizza or something. It wasn't great
The gluten does not come back if u pulverize it. You'll likely end up someone terrible.
Edit: I sometimes forget to proofread "some things"
They might end up making a pretty crappy loaf of bread but it's a bit much to imply they'll become a bad person because of this.
I'm going to edit but not change the context cause this made me smile.
You made shitty bread, when you could have made good bread. Straight to Jail.
Yeah but the texture would probably suck
Croutons are cooked twice with no problems. Once the bread gets stale it probably grinds easily.
If the bread is just stale you can restore it by wetting it and heating in an oven or microwave.
Partially restore it. At best, you put about 60% of the water into the starch crystals that the bread had when it was fresh. It's a massive improvement, but it's not hard to tell which is which in a side-by-side comparison.
I haven't tried it. I can only assume you won't get much gluten development. It might be more crumbly and dense, like cornbread, I would think.