One fateful evening not too long ago, I was finishing up my dinner at Danforth when I couldn’t help but snoop on a conversation between my two friends, Kristen and Eric. The two were discussing their passionate love for bread, and Eric was deep into a fantasy about the potential to put chocolate chips into bread. I, a known bread connoisseur, couldn’t help but interject some important bread knowledge into the conversation.
Thanks to our good old friend Buzzfeed Tasty, I had been aware for some time of the existence of the magical thing called “ice cream bread,” which is literally just taking a pint of your favorite ice cream flavor and adding some self-rising flour and maybe some sprinkles if you’re feeling particularly adventurous. When I informed my friends of this new vehicle for carbohydrates, they were justifiably skeptical yet intrigued. At this point, the conversation devolved into an increasingly horrifying speculation on what other types of food products one could possibly “bread.” The ideas ranged from the potentially decent marinara sauce to the intensely questionable Mel Sauce and finally ended up with the incredibly ridiculous notion of toothpaste bread. Because why bother brushing your teeth when you can eat your dental hygiene instead?
A normal person would have simply laughed at the utter nonsense and gone on her merry way, but I was a deadly combination of curious, stupid, and hungry for bread. Upon leaving the dining hall, I immediately went to Hillside and purchased all of the necessary ingredients for what would certainly become an interesting experience.
What follows is a brief, informative overview of what one can and cannot bread:
Ice Cream Bread
I began with two cups of plain vanilla ice cream and 1 ¼ cups of homemade self-rising flour, and using my trusty Buzzfeed recipe, I whipped up some bread in a mere 45 minutes. In my great impatience to try my creation, I evidently took the bread out too soon; its texture was that of uncooked dough. Fortunately, however, ice cream is ice cream no matter how you dress it up, so its taste was impeccable if you could get past the slightly nauseating texture.
★★★★☆
Marinara Sauce Bread
There is no recipe on the internet for two-ingredient marinara bread, so I haphazardly threw together some indeterminate quantity of flour and baking powder into a loaf pan full of Preggo until it looked decent. After quite some time in the oven, the bread looked done enough, so I took it out and offered it to my friends. The top was something like the texture of bread, but the inside had remained a soggy travesty.
“That was the beef jerky of bread,” said junior Regis Acosta.
“It’s not too far off from eating pasta?” added junior Katie McKendrick.
They were clearly trying to spare my feelings, because my response was to gag dramatically.
★★☆☆☆
Mel Sauce Bread
I took the same approach to this bread as the Marinara bread but added slightly more flour, and the results were…fascinating.
“It comes across as an abomination against nature. It’s actually not that bad,” said Acosta.
“Interesting. It tastes like barbecue-flavored corn chips. It feels so wrong,” McKendrick said.
The taste of the bread was not altogether horrible, in my opinion, but the resulting loaf quite literally had the structural integrity of a pile of sand.
★★☆☆☆
Toothpaste Bread
My method here was to squirt about four times the healthy dose of toothpaste into a small, oven-safe bowl and then to dilute it with some water. I added flour and baking powder in entirely random proportions and let it bake. The result, maddeningly enough, had the closest texture to actual bread of any of my attempts. While toothpaste is not technically edible, we all dutifully sampled the bread anyway, ignoring the fact the originally blue toothpaste had taken on a creepy green hue once cooked.
“It makes me feel uncomfortable. I need to stop touching it,” McKendrick said.
“It’s like a jelly-belly bean, one of those beanboozled ones,” junior Ari Hasbrouck said.
The texture of this bread was actually fairly nice, and as for the taste, well, it was toothpaste. In a normal context, toothpaste is tolerable, and in this context, it was downright unsettling.
I cannot in good conscience recommend any of these bread recipes to people that I actually like. But will I continue in my investigation into what can be turned into bread? A normal person would certainly say no, but my love for bread is eternal. I will continue undeterred.
★★★☆☆
Editor’s Note: The preparation of these breads was supervised by an experienced bread baker. The Campus Times does not recommend the consumption of toothpaste in any form and may not be held liable for any personal injury resulting from amateur bread mishaps.
