Same loaf, cut in half, half in a bag on the counter and half in a bag in the fridge, because I was trying to stop it going mouldy in a humid week. Counter half was fine on day three. Fridge half was dry and crumbly by day two and tasted like it was a week old, and it had not dried out visibly because it was sealed. I assumed cold was supposed to preserve things.
Worth saying the fridge is not always wrong. In a genuinely humid week, an unsliced crusty loaf on the counter can grow mould in two days, and stale toasted bread is better than mouldy fresh bread. If you are going to toast it anyway, the trade is fine. It is only a mistake when you wanted a sandwich.
Bread bin in the middle here, better than a sealed plastic bag on the counter because the crust does not go soft and it still breathes a bit.
Also, loaves are not equal at this. Enriched breads with fat in them, brioche, milk loaves, anything with butter or oil, stale noticeably slower because the fat interferes with the starch reorganising. A lean crusty loaf with flour water salt and yeast has nothing to slow it down, which is why a good baguette is genuinely over within a day.
Same principle explains why day old cake is fine and day old plain bread is not, which I had never connected until now.
@counter_top_carla · 9mo ago · 3 replies
Going stale and drying out are two different things, which is the bit that makes this confusing.
When bread bakes, the starch granules absorb water and swell into a soft, disorganised structure. As it cools and sits, those starch molecules slowly rearrange themselves back into an ordered, crystalline form and push water out as they do it. That is staling. The bread can be sealed in a bag with all its water still inside and be thoroughly stale, which is exactly what you observed.
The rate of that rearrangement depends on temperature, and it is fastest a little above freezing. A fridge at about 4 degrees sits almost exactly in the worst zone, several times faster than a kitchen counter at 20.
So the practical answer is skip past that zone entirely. Slice the loaf, freeze what you are not eating in the next day or two, and toast straight from frozen. Freezing is well below the bad range and it stops the mould problem you were trying to solve.
The rearrangement is also partly reversible with heat, which is why a stale roll put in a hot oven for a few minutes comes back to something close to fresh. It goes stale again faster afterwards though, so do it just before you eat it.
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@chef_deglaze · 9mo ago
Sprinkling or brushing the crust with a little water before the oven helps a lot with the refresh, especially on a crusty loaf. Five to seven minutes at around 180.
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@threeleggedcat · 9mo ago
So the fridge was actively the worst option rather than a neutral one. Freezing sliced from now on.
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