When I first started my culinary career, the chef I was working for challenged me to think of ways to use up excess bread – “but NOT bread pudding.”

The first idea I came up with was to turn it into gnocchi, which I attempted to do. I wanted to blend the bread up into a flour and use that instead of flour in the gnocchi. I made a few attempts at this. All of which were okay but nothing like I wanted them to be. And, needless to say, it never made it onto a menu.

A few years later, as a more established chef, I returned to my original idea. This time I worked out all of the kinks and created one of the recipes I am most proud of in my career as a chef thus far – both because I think it is delicious and because it fights food waste.

In this recipe, I rehydrate bread-scraps flour with vegetable stock. This gives it a potato-like consistency that is perfect for gnocchi.

I want to share this recipe with you now in hopes that you can both enjoy it and that it can inspire you find innovative ways to repurpose your food waste.

Making Bread-Scrap Flour

1. Breads with a lower fat content are much easier to use for this recipe. Breads like a brioche or pain au lait that have a lot of butter in them are delicious in this recipe. However, they are harder to blend into a flour because they can become a bit gummy. I still use them. I just make sure that I have half and half of a dryer bread like a baguette, sourdough, or ciabatta along with the higher fat-content bread to balance it out in the blender.
2. Keep a bag in your freezer of bread bits. Once the bag is full, turn it into bread-scrap flour that can be kept on your shelf for a quick gnocchi whenever you want it.
3. Before freezing or drying the bread, tear it into smaller chunks. This makes it much easier to blend.
4. Make sure the bread is completely dry before attempting to blend it into a flour. If it still has soft areas, give it some more time to dry out.
5. If you are drying your bread on a sheet tray, mix the bread scraps up part way through to ensure even drying.

Gnocchi Dough

1. When kneading the dough, start by gently folding the ricotta into the flour a couple of times before you add in the bread-scrap mixture. This keeps the process a little bit cleaner.
2. Knead the dough until just combined. Do not over knead.
3. Cut the dough into four parts. Roll each part into a coil one at a time, and cut out the gnocchi before moving on to the next coil.
4. I use a bench scraper to cut out the gnocchi. You could also use a butter knife.
5. Keep the cut gnocchi on a lightly floured sheet tray until ready to cook.