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Prepared Bread for Canapés
Canapés are made from stale white bread, cut in quarter-inch slices and then shaped with a cutter into circles or rings two and one-half or three inches in diameter or cut into squares, strips, triangles or other fancy shapes. These portions of bread are then either fried in deep fat and drained on absorbent paper or sautéd in just enough butter or other fat to keep them from burning; or they may be toasted.
This is a component recipe: the crisp bread base that carries whatever spread or garnish follows. The only real variables are thickness and how hard you fry.
- Stale bread is the pointDay-old or two-day-old bread cuts cleanly and absorbs less fat. Fresh sandwich bread tears under a cutter and turns greasy in the pan. A firm white pullman loaf, unsliced if you can get it, gives the neatest quarter-inch slices.
- Frying temperatureFor deep fat, 360-375F browns the bread in under a minute without soaking it. The original gives no temperature; the old test was a cube of bread that colours in roughly 40 seconds to a minute.
- Sautéing"Just enough butter or other fat to keep them from burning" means a thin film, and it means turning the pieces promptly. Butter alone browns fast at this thinness; a mix of butter and a neutral oil is more forgiving.
- ToastingThe toasted version is the driest of the three and best when the topping is moist. The recipe gives no method; oven-toasting on a sheet rather than in a toaster will keep the shapes flat.
- Trimming and cuttingCut the crusts off the whole slice first, then stamp the shapes, and keep the trimmings for crumbs. A 2 1/2 to 3 inch round is a two-bite canapé; strips and triangles waste less bread.
- YieldThe count depends entirely on the loaf and the cutter; at quarter-inch slices one three-inch round per slice is the usual limit, and squares or triangles waste less.
- Making aheadFried or toasted bases will keep a day or two in an airtight tin and can be re-crisped in a low oven. Top them only just before serving, or the base softens from underneath.
Canapé is French for a sofa or couch, and the cookery sense is generally explained as an extension of that image: a piece of bread on which something is seated. The form belonged to the era of the formal multi-course dinner, when a small savoury bite preceded the soup, and it was widely taken up in American home entertaining around the turn of the twentieth century, alongside the chafing-dish and 'dainty luncheon' fashions. Treating the base as a separate lesson makes the dozens of spread recipes that follow interchangeable. Stale bread is called for partly for thrift and partly because it cuts and fries better than fresh.