Home › Bread › Pulled Bread (Remove the crust from a loaf)
Pulled Bread (Remove the crust from a loaf)
Remove the crust from a loaf of bread and tear the crust in pieces. Place in oven and dry until crisp all through.
Two sentences of instruction that assume a cook who already knows what pulled bread looks like. The essentials are a slack oven, plenty of torn surface, and enough time to dry the pieces all the way through rather than brown them.
- Crust or crumbAs printed the direction is contradictory: the crust is removed, then "the crust" is torn. Traditional pulled bread is made from the soft interior, pulled into ragged lumps with the fingers or two forks so the torn surfaces crisp into peaks; the crust is discarded or saved for crumbs.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; the direction is simply "place in oven." In practice a slow oven, roughly 275-300F, suits the purpose. The object is desiccation, not colour, so the pieces should turn pale gold, not brown.
- TimingNo time is given because it depends on the size of the pieces. Reckon 20-30 minutes for pieces the size of a walnut, turning once, and test by breaking one open: any softness at the centre means it goes back in.
- The bread to useA close-grained white loaf a day old pulls into the best shaggy shapes. Fresh bread compresses instead of tearing, and open-crumbed modern artisan loaves give fewer of the fine crisp points that are the whole appeal.
- YieldNo quantity is given. A loaf of about a pound should serve roughly six to eight at table. It shrinks considerably in the oven, so err toward more.
- Keeping and servingCool completely on a rack before storing, or trapped steam will soften it. Airtight, it keeps a week and can be refreshed for a few minutes in a low oven. Served with soup, salad, cheese or game in place of crackers.
Pulled bread was a familiar item on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dinner table, where it stood between the plain roll and the fancy cracker: something to eat with soup, with cheese, or with the salad course, and a use for yesterday's loaf in a kitchen that wasted nothing. The name is literal, from pulling the crumb apart by hand rather than slicing it, so that every torn face bakes into a crisp ridge. Recipes for it appear in English and American household books through the nineteenth century, usually as briefly as this one. Its appearance in Lowney's Cook Book (1907), a volume published by a chocolate manufacturer but written as a general household manual, shows how thoroughly such small economies were still expected of a competent kitchen.