How to Make Old Bread Fresh Again
- It is hard to finish a whole loaf of bread before it goes dried.
- There are a few unlike hacks which tin bring your dried bread back to life.
- The well-nigh effective hack is spraying your loaf with water and baking it.
Fact: Unless you're feeding a oversupply, information technology can be tough to finish upwardly an unabridged loaf of staff of life in the cursory fourth dimension information technology takes your carby goodness to go from fluffy and chewy to dense and hard. But letting even a slice of that $7 artisan loaf go to waste material would be pitiful. (And hey, maybe you're not in the mood to make croutons or French toast.) And so what can you lot do?
Turns out, it's possible to bring bread that'due south past its prime back to life. And according to the cyberspace, in that location are actually lots of ways to exercise it. Whether they all work is another story, of class. Then I decided to see which method worked best.
(For the tape, nosotros're talking near bread tha''s strong or dry. Once yous spot mold, there's no turning dorsum. You've gotta toss it.)
Here'due south what happened—and how you tin can do better by your stale breadstuff.
Why Staff of life Goes Dried
To figure out which method would exercise the best chore of bringing my bread back to life, I thought it would be helpful to understand what causes bread to turn dry and hard in the commencement place.
Did y'all know that staff of life starts going stale inside minutes of being pulled from the oven?"As bread cools, the structure of the starchy carbohydrates kickoff to crystallize," explains Constitute of Food Technologists by president Roger Clemens, Ph.D. This crystallization process occurs as the bread loses moisture and oestrus. It's actually a adept thing, because information technology's what helps piping hot, fresh bread firm upward enough then you lot tin slice it. But as more moisture is lost, more of those starch crystals form, and the bread starts to plough stale.
The adept news is that adding rut and moisture back into bread can brand information technology soft and chewy once again. To a betoken, anyway. "In many cases, the bread won't exist 100 pct, but information technology will notwithstanding be palatable," Clemens says.
The All-time Ways to Revive Stale Bread
Armed with this knowledge, I decided to put a few popular stale breadstuff hacks to the exam. Here's a look at what worked—and what didn't.
Method 1: Put bread in a bag with some celery.
Volition tucking a distressing loaf into a bag with a stalk of celery and letting the two hang out overnight give you delicious bread? Some folks say yes, just I was pretty skeptical. Celery does contain a lot of water, and information technology'south possible for dry out breadstuff to absorb some of that moisture. Simply it all the same didn't seem like the best option because there was no heat involved.
And indeed, my celery bread wasn't the nigh succulent. I let the two sit down in a rolled-up paper purse for about eight hours. The bread was noticeably softer every bit a result merely in a soggy, damp, unappetizing sort of manner. As well, it smelled like celery.
Method two: Microwave bread with a clammy paper towel.
Wrapping breadstuff in a damp newspaper towel surrounds it with moisture, and the microwave adds heat. Then, in theory, you should have all the elements you demand to bring dying bread dorsum to life, right?
All the same, the results were underwhelming. Enshrouding the bread and microwaving it for ane infinitesimal did make my stale half-loaf noticeably softer with more moisture. But instead of getting pleasantly well-baked, the crust turned soft too. If that doesn't carp you, then this method works, merely I thought it was meh.
Method 3: Wrap breadstuff in foil and bake information technology.
This technique seemed like a step in the right management. The foil wrapping seemed similar it would trap some steam as the bread warmed upward, yielding a softer texture. And letting the loaf hang out in a 375-degree oven for ten minutes seemed similar information technology would add plenty rut to get the exterior nice and crisp.
Information technology definitely worked better than the other 2 tricks. The chaff got fairly crisp, which I liked. The downside was that the rest of the bread kind of dried out too. So it didn't exactly make the texture fresh. Instead, it just turned the clock back by a mean solar day or then.
Method 4: Spritz bread with water and broil it.
This hack, which was basically like method No. 3 simply with one actress step, seemed like it would be the holy grail. Before wrapping my bread in foil and blistering, I used a spray bottle to lightly spritz the crust with water. I had a feeling this would add together back some of the moisture that my bread had lost, yielding a loaf that was crisp on the outside and soft on the inside.
Was information technology perfect? No—this didn't taste exactly similar the bread I had bought from my local bakery four days before. But information technology was pretty close! Out of all the methods I tried, this i was far and away the winner.
The Lesser Line
Yous need two things to revive stale bread: wet and heat. Misting the chaff lightly with water, wrapping the loaf in foil, and baking at 375 degrees for 10 minutes delivered both of these key elements and made my four-24-hour interval-old bread taste relatively fresh.
Of form, it would be even ameliorate if you lot could keep the bread from going stale in the get-go identify. It'south incommunicable to make bread last forever, but if y'all know information technology'll be a few days before you plan to cease up that loaf, consider sticking it in the freezer. (These instructions tell yous exactly how to do it.) That will aid slow the loss of moisture so your bread is fresher whenever yous're ready to eat it.
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Source: https://www.insider.com/how-can-i-bring-stale-bread-back-to-life-2018-7
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