Home made croutons that make you go 'Wow'

I love croutons, but very rarely have I found store bought ones that make me go 'Wow'. I don't know why, it did not seem hard at all to make my own, with the flavors that I wanted. I guess when you are selling a national product it does get hard to please everyone. Well, now that I know I can make my own, I will not purchase another bag of croutons from a store. If you have a bread maker this works perfect for you because you are saving money twice, and get to pick what type of bread you want to make your croutons out of. For this recipe I chose Sourdough, and it went really well with the Artichoke and Avocado salad.

You can start with the amount of cubed bread you want, just remember to calculate all of your other ingredients to match.

3 cups cubed(1 inch) sourdough bread
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp sea salt
1Tblsp Mrs. Dash Garlic & Herb seasoning

Pre heat oven to 300 degrees.
Place cubed bread in mixing bowl. Drizzle olive oil onto bread while flipping the mixture.
Once all of the cubes apper to have some oil drizzle, add the Mrs. Dash and the salt and flip the ingredients again until you see all cubes coated with seasoning.
Place seasoned cubes onto a baking sheet and bake until golden brown.(approx. 10-15 minutes)

Store extra croutons in your pantry in a sealed air tight tupper ware type container.

(flipping is a trick you see the chefs do with a saute pan when they have their hands full and need to stir the ingredients: grab the bowl by the rim and in one quick move push it away from you about 3 inches and then pull back towards you the same distance. The ingredients slide up the far wall of the bowl and into the air, and your motion catches them as they fall. Try it the first time over the sink, otherwise you will be cleaning the floor of the ingredients that were in the bowl.)


Tip:
If you have a recipe that calls for breadcrumbs, you can make your croutons ahead of time and crush them to the disired consistancy for your bread crumbs. This, again, will allow you to control tha amout of salt and fat that goes in to your cooking; not to meantion the lack of preservatives and other chemicals you will miss out on.

Happy cooking!