Breadcrumbs

Food · Grain · Food, Typed Supps

Because the water is gone, everything else in the bread is roughly three times as concentrated.

Stage by stage

Intake (Chewing and amylase): Salivary amylase begins hydrolysing the gelatinised starch immediately.
Digestion (Fast starch breakdown): With little fibre or fat present, starch is broken to glucose rapidly.
Absorption (Glucose, folate, iodine): Glucose absorbs quickly, along with fortification-derived folate, thiamin and iodine.
Use (Energy or storage): Glucose is oxidised or stored as glycogen and fat; sodium enters fluid balance.

Time to effect

Under an hour: Blood glucose from a crumbed coating rises within roughly 30 to 45 minutes.

Allergens

Contains: Gluten. Derived from what this food is, not from a product label.

Eating patterns

Fits: Vegan, Vegetarian, Pescatarian, Halal, Kosher. Depends on the product: Low-FODMAP.

Satiety

118 on the satiety index, where white bread is 100 — moderate. Modelled from the Holt et al. (1995) measurements.

Environmental footprint

1.6 kg CO2e and 648 litres of freshwater per kg, matched to "Wheat & rye" in Poore & Nemecek (2018), Science 360.

Cost band

Cheap — roughly £3 per kg, as a band midpoint rather than a price.

Key nutrients

Carbohydrate
Folate
Sodium
Thiamin

Nutrition per 100g

Calories: 382
Protein: 14g
Carbohydrate: 68.5g
of which sugars: 4.6g
Fat: 4.1g
of which saturated: 0.5g
Fibre: 4.7g
Sodium: 650mg

Food vs. supplement

Not a supplement question, but worth stating plainly: the folate in breadcrumbs is synthetic folic acid added to flour by law, chemically the same compound found in supplements and absorbed more completely than natural food folate. It is one of the reasons folate intake from ordinary bread-based foods in Australia is higher than people assume.

Kitchen tip

Coarse crumbs made from stale bread torn rather than blitzed, or Japanese panko, absorb less oil than fine dry crumbs because the open structure traps steam that pushes oil back out. Oven-baking crumbed food on a wire rack at high heat gets most of the crispness with a fraction of the fat. Stale bread makes better crumbs than fresh — fresh bread gums up rather than shattering.

Common myth

“Breadcrumbs are just a coating, they barely count.” In reality: Dried bread is concentrated bread. A standard crumbing supplies real energy, refined starch and a few hundred milligrams of sodium, and the crumb's texture decides how much frying oil comes with it.