You've brought home a delicious loaf of sourdough and now you find yourself wondering, "What do I do with this?" Never fear! Neighborhood Bakehouse is here to help you with ideas for what to do with bread outside of the conventional sandwich or toast (though those are ALWAYS great options too).
For our first, "What to do with Bread" we present to you: Baked Soup!
Like many of you, we love soup in our house. Before we start I have to confess something. We often eat soup out of a can. Yes. I said it. Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. There are times when, after a 16 hour day in the Bakehouse or a full day of homeschooling, nursing and caring for a baby and running a handful of online businesses it's just tough to muster the strength to craft a complex dinner. For those nights, we keep a selection of soups from Sprague on hand. These are great as the ingredient list is actually made up of food! It's amazing how complicated it can be sometimes to actually find food made of things that were once alive rather than that belong in a chemistry project.
But I digress...
Here's what you need to make this simple dish:
Ingredient List
Sourdough
Bacon
Ground Beef
Minestrone Soup
Shredded Cheese
Parmesan
Butter
Process
Brown ground beef (we get all of our beef from Noble Provisions is Griswald).
Heat soup.
Once beef is browned, add it to the soup.
Chop of the bacon and cook it on the stove top in a pan. Once cooked, remove bacon but keep the fat in the pan.
Add 1/4 stick of butter to bacon grease (more or less depending how much of the grease is left over).
Cut thick slices of sourdough (we cut them about 1")
Place the slices of sourdough into the bacon grease and butter.
Cook on low to medium heat on one side only until browned. Low heat is great for really getting a good, deep crisp on the bread.
Place the bread on a baking sheet with the crisp side down.
Cover the top of the bread with soup. Add solids first as much as possible and then pour the broth over. With the bottom of the bread fried, it will hold a decent amoutn of soup without becoming over soggy and breaking down.
Add bacon on top of soup and beef.
Sprinkle cheese on top to your heart's content.
Dust it with parmesan
Place in the oven under the broiler until the cheese is melted and just starts to brown (2 minutes or so but keep an eye on it).
That's it! The great thing with a recipe like this is that it should serve as a starting point that you can make into whatever you like.
This Baked Soup paired really well with a Bordeaux but it would also be great with a darker beer.
...or milk. Most of the family had it with milk.
Let me know if you try it! We'd love to hear what you try!