How to make bread sauce: The perfect recipe
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What is Bread Sauce?
The quintessential British sauce to accompany traditional Christmas dinners, bread sauce is thick with a rich and herby taste. It adds an element of luxury and umami, despite it being a cheap recipe designed to add bulk and carbs for the working classes since medieval times. By using stale bread, this recipe took cheap ingredients and enhanced them, as waste was a luxury in Britain's past.
The sauce is actually easy to make, combining cloves, bay leaves and sometimes nutmeg (although we don't add this) to milk and breadcrumbs, bringing it slowly to the boil and then serving with gravy on turkey, roast chicken, pheasant or goose. Homemade bread sauce is so much better and more satisfying than packet sauces, and doesn't add too much to the Xmas day to-do list because it can be made ahead.
So what makes our homemade bread sauce recipe the perfect accompaniment, in our opinion? We don't stud an onion and flavour the milk with it like you would in a traditional bread sauce recipe. Instead we soften the onion and leave it in the sauce, it adds to the taste and doesn't waste a perfectly nice onion! A classic bread sauce usually uses a clove-studded onion (which is removed and thrown away) and something extra like double cream. Ours is lighter, tastier and doesn't have any waste.
Not everyone is a fan of bread sauce, so check before you make gallons! Luckily it lasts well and is delicious in a number of recipes (see below).
Essential Equipment for Making Bread Sauce
A non stick medium saucepan - we recommend Le Creuset
The Ninja Professional Chopper or similar food processor
A good Global kitchen knife
Essential Ingredients List for Bread Sauce
1 white onion - very finely chopped
30g salted butter
4-5 (75g) slices of stale (hard) white bread, crusts removed and whizzed in the blender
2-3 whole cloves
1-2 fresh bay leaves
400ml whole milk (don't use semi skimmed, it's not as tasty)
Types of bread suitable for bread sauce
The more artisan you can be with your bread, the more wonderful flavours are imparted into the sauce. The texture of good-quality white breads absorb the milk and sauce better while also imparting their own distinct flavour. Supermarket factory bread will still create a nice, pleasant sauce but not as good as a loaf from the bakery counter.
Bread for bread sauce is best when using stale bread that's gone hard (but not mouldy obviously!), so don't especially go out of your way to find the most expensive bread and use it fresh. Use what you have, but the better the quality, the better the bread sauce recipe will turn out.
Absolutely don't use fresh bread, it just won't work the same - so plan ahead and ensure you have enough slices of stale bread.
How to Make Homemade Bread Sauce
Remove the crusts from your bread slices and then roughly tear so it will fit easily in the food processor or Ninja chopper
Whizz the bread into white breadcrumbs, leave some texture, the sauce doesn't want to be lumpy but you also don't want it smooth as soup
Dice the white onion as finely as you can
Sweat it down slowly over a gentle heat with butter in a clean saucepan, stirring with a wooden spoon so the onion doesn't brown
Add 2 or 3 whole cloves to the pan
Add 1 or 2 fresh bay leaves
Add the milk to the pan, bring it to a medium heat but don't let it boil yet. This helps to infuse the onion, clove and bay flavours into the milk
Add the breadcrumbs and stir into the milky mixture
Increase the temperature to bring the bread sauce mixture slowly to the boil. Ensure you keep stirring to prevent it catching on the bottom of the pan
Once the sauce is boiling, Season with salt and white pepper if you're worried about colour or black pepper if you don't care. Leave it for a minute or two and then remove from the heat.
Remove the cloves and bay leaves - the sauce is now ready to serve
Recipes for Leftover Bread Sauce
Leftover Turkey Korma - add instead of cream to temper the spicing and create the korma texture.
Turkey Ramen - Add along with Turkey or chicken stock to create a white broth which really adds depth of flavour to the noodles.
Cheese on Toast - This is great! Make your toast and add a smear of bread sauce, pop the cheese on top and grill until the cheese goes bubbly.
Roast Turkey Leftovers Sandwich - leftover bread sauce is delicious on a big chunky turkey sandwich on boxing day
Tips for the Perfect Bread Sauce
If you want to make the bread sauce in advance on Christmas day, then you can keep it fresh by pouring a thin splash of milk on top of the sauce. This will prevent the bread sauce from forming a skin and going lumpy. The milk can be stirred in later when you come to reheat the sauce. Bring it back briefly to the boil, remove from the heat and then it's ready to serve with your Christmas Dinner!
When cooking the onion, the time to the right level of softness will depend on how thick or fine you chopped the onion in step 3 above. You want the onion to be soft but not browned and you don't want it to be crunchy in the sauce.
Make sure your bread isn't too fresh, it wants to be stale enough to be hard without going too far over.
The size of the breadcrumbs will define the texture of the sauce, finer crumb will create a smoother, more soupy sauce - whereas having a coarse breadcrumbs with bite and size will create more texture. Personally we prefer a larger breadcrumb, so we make sure we don't over blend in the food processor.
Other Recipes for Christmas Dinner
The Ultimate Christmas Turkey Dinner
Why Do We Have Bread Sauce At Christmas?
Bread sauce is a staple of a traditional British Christmas dinner, steeped in tradition. With origins tracing back to the Middle Ages, peasants used stale bread to thicken sauces, as waste was something they could not afford. Eventually the upper classes adopted the sauce and a bowl of bread sauce on Christmas Day became embedded in British culture. Traditionally served alongside turkey or other roast dinners, for many families, it's simply not Christmas lunch without bread sauce.
Can you buy ready made bread sauce?
As with many sauces, you can buy ready made bread sauce from a number of brands. Our recommendation is don't, however if the stress of cooking for all and sundry is already at maximum and you need to take the pressure off, then try the Shropshire Spice Company's version. It's gluten free and you simply need to add a milk of your choice.