I put a good sourdough loaf in the fridge to stop it going mouldy in a humid week, and by day two it was drier and tougher than an identical loaf I left in a paper bag on the counter for four days. That seems backwards, since cold slows everything else down. Is the fridge doing something specific to bread, or did I just get unlucky with the loaf?
The satisfying part is that staling is partly reversible, which drying out isn't. Warm a stale slice properly, in a toaster or a hot oven for a few minutes, and the crystalline structure comes apart again and the bread is noticeably softer. It goes back faster the second time, but it works.
A quick splash of water on the crust and five minutes in a hot oven brings a day-old baguette almost back. Best trick I know for a loaf you were about to give up on.
Storage detail that matters as much as temperature: paper for a crusty loaf you'll finish in two days, plastic for a soft sandwich loaf. Plastic keeps a crust soft and slightly sad, paper lets a soft loaf dry out. Everyone owns exactly the wrong one for the bread they buy.
Also worth knowing that enriched breads with fat in them, brioche and the like, stale more slowly. The fat interferes with the starch reordering. It's not that they're fresher, it's that they resist the process.
@aura_annie · 7mo ago · 3 replies
You didn't get unlucky, the fridge is genuinely the worst place for bread.
Stale bread is not mainly bread that has lost water. It's bread whose starch has reorganised itself from the loose disordered state it reached in the oven back into an ordered crystalline one, and that reordering is fastest at temperatures a little above freezing. A fridge sits right in the middle of the worst range for it.
A freezer is cold enough that the molecules can't move into position, so staling nearly stops. Room temperature is warm enough that it happens, just more slowly than in the fridge. So the ranking is freezer, counter, fridge, from best to worst.
The fridge does slow mould, which is the trade-off you were making. If you need a week, slice the loaf and freeze it and toast from frozen. That works genuinely well and nobody can tell.
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@aura_annie · 7mo ago
Parchment or a fold of paper between the slices if you want to take out two at a time. Otherwise you get one brick shaped loaf again in a different form.
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@frosting_fixer · 7mo ago
Slicing before freezing is the practical bit I always skip and then regret when I'm trying to saw a frozen loaf.
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