Thanks to Paolo and Cara for sharing this recipe with us!
Surprisingly, bread is one of the most wasted foods in the UK, so we are always on the look out for recipes to use it up.
Paolo’s Sicilian family recipe for ‘formaggio purpetto’ is a traditional meal for Good Friday, when meat is avoided. They are a ‘meatless meatball’ served with a tomato sauce, macaroni and a stir-fired vegetable.
They would also make a great end of the week dinner when the fridge is running low. Many households would still have some leftover bread, a piece of cheese and an egg. We used cheddar cheese, but just use whatever you have in the fridge, or even a mixture.
We actually made them in the park as part of the Learn2Sustain youth project led by Transition Chipping Norton.
Image by Cara Hedges
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes to one hour
Servings: 4
Ingredients
- 100 g stale bread made into breadcrumbs
- 150 g grated cheese
- 1-2 eggs beaten
- crushed or chopped garlic to taste
- chopped fresh mint to taste
- oil for frying
- passata or homemade tomato sauce
- serve with macaroni
Image by Cara Hedges
Method
Lightly mix the breadcrumbs, cheese, mint and garlic together – add enough egg so that it just holds together. Don’t over mix it or it will become stodgy.
Make walnut sized balls and pat them flat in a frying pan with a small amount of oil. Fry them for about 5 minutes on each side until they are set in the middle. You can them eat them on their own or in a sandwich.
Alternatively, add them to a simple tomato sauce and let them bubble away gently for about one hour to thicken and flavour the sauce. Once cooked, separate the fritters from the sauce. Mix the sauce with cooked macaroni and layer it on people’s plates. Add a layer of fennel fried in olive oil and garlic, then a layer of breadcrumbs. Repeat the layers, ending with breadcrumbs and serve.
In Sicily, the fritters would also form the basis of a second course, when they would be served alongside vegetables. This could be a mixture of lightly fried purple sprouting broccoli and other veggies deep fried in batter. Try parboiled cauliflower or take the ribs from leaves of cardoons, scrub off the bitter membrane, blanche, batter and deep fry.
Around 1 million loaves of bread are wasted in the UK every single day1. Bread is often thrown away because it has past it’s ‘best before’ date and people think it is stale. If that is the case, use it up by making breadcrumbs. You can even freeze them to use on another day when you are short of time.
Sources
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