MrsDangermouse said:. Elawin Veteran. Baguettes are made differently from ordinary bread. The dough is moist and contains no fat or sugar, and is cooked in a steam oven or in an ordinary oven with a large bowl of hot water. Traditionally, it was also never made to be kept but eaten on the day. I have frozen leftover bread but it doesn't keep long even in the freezer - it tends to go quite hard if frozen for too long and then falls apart on thawing out.
As for ordinary bread, I make my own - two small loaves rather than one large one, one of which goes in the freezer. A small loaf lasts me days, and takes very little time to thaw out. I keep my bread fresh by putting it in one of those large plastic sweet containers that seem to appear miraculously at Christmas time.
As Cinisajoy said, most bread sold in supermarkets and even your local baker's is brought in from a central location these days. Cinisajoy said:. Just out of curiosity, where are you in the USA? That can also be a factor. You don't know how old they really are. Also if they were packaged while still hot, they lost moisture before you ever got it home.
It's impossible to make bread last forever, but if you know it'll be a few days before you plan to finish up that loaf, consider sticking it in the freezer. These instructions tell you exactly how to do it. Follow Greatist on Facebook.
World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Marygrace Taylor , Greatist. It is hard to finish a whole loaf of bread before it goes stale.
There are a few different hacks which can bring your stale bread back to life. The most effective hack is spraying your loaf with water and baking it. Sign up for notifications from Insider! Stay up to date with what you want to know. Loading Something is loading. Email address. Food Contributor. The stark contrast between a crusty crust and soft inside is delicious. The deterioration process will literally start as soon as the bread is out of the oven or off the heat source.
Within a few hours in the case of a traditional French baguette or days sourdough breads , your bread will have turned stale. Gone is that crunchy crust and moist inside. Preventing, delaying, or even reversing this process is a holy grail of many bread makers and eaters. A simple loaf of bread is made of at least wheat flour, water, yeast, and probably some salt.
The dough you make will be soft and flexible, easy to deform, knead and shape into your desired bread. The heat of the oven causes the proteins to denature, the starches gelatinize, more on that later.
Whereas water is spread evenly throughout the dough, that is no longer the case in a baked bread. The crust contains considerably less water than the center, giving it that crunch. Accompanying all those changes in texture and structure is a change in flavor. While bread is in the oven, sugars and proteins react with one another in the Maillard reaction.
This complex set of chemical reactions causes the bread to turn brown and causes the formation of all sorts of aromas and flavors.
When your bread comes out of the oven the high temperatures causes a lot of these to evaporate and get into the air, hitting your nose when you enter that bakery or open that oven door. Staling sets in very soon after. During staling bread loses its freshness, it loses that crunchy crust and the center turns dry and chewy. A truly stale bread requires a lot of chewing and teeth power to be eaten.
Water in most foods has a very strong tendency to move throughout. Energetically, it is best for the water to be distributed evenly, such that the water activity is the same throughout the whole food. In the case of bread the crust is a lot drier and has a lower water activity than the center of the bread. As such, almost immediately after the bread has cooled down, moisture from the center will move into the crust. In a worst case, eliminating all that crunch in a matter of a few hours!
Keep in mind that for all of this to happen only a small amount of water needs to actually move. Even though moisture has a clear role to role, it only partially explains why bread turns stale and turns dry!
Instead, it is because of a molecular reconfiguration of the starch in bread. Starch is a main component of wheat flour as it is for many other major food sources worldwide such as potatoes , rice, and cassava for instance.
Amylose is a relatively simple molecule, it is a long chain of glucose units. Well, make sure the salt does not come in direct contact with the yeast. Note that many recipes tell you to add the salt to the dough only after the initial mix of the other ingredients, and the salt does not touch it directly.
Contrary to salt, Yeast loves Sugar which helps to accelerate their growth. Bread needs time invested in its molding, otherwise, all the work and care you put into making the dough will not have the desired results.
You need patience and make sure that you invest the time and effort in this last stage before baking. There are many shapes you can mold your bread into. The idea is to have enough tension in your dough when it is finished. This tension will come from folding and tucking your dough into the center of the bread. Then start tucking the dough inwards to the center of the loaf. If it is a round bread then you simply go around the outside of the dough and tuck it into the middle until you have gotten all the way around and got back to the start.
This will form a round loaf. If it is a long loaf than you will want to fold the bread in an envelope manner.
Taking the left and right sides of the bread, stretch them out and fold them inwards, then take the bottom or the top of the loaf and fold those in one at a time. Finally, grab the top half of the loaf and roll it to about the middle of the bread. This should leave another third of the bread remaining to fold over. Grab the half that you have rolled and the roll it over once more and close the loaf with the palm of your hand. This should create that nice tension you will need.
Meaning your dough is not too hard, to begin with. Use only the amount of flour to make a workable dough. It will probably come out sticky as hell- good! Also, take into consideration that heavier flours like whole wheat or rye are not a good fit if you want light and airy loaves.
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