How to Make Day Old Bread Bakery Fresh Again
- It is difficult to cease a whole loaf of bread before information technology goes stale.
- There are a few different hacks which tin bring your stale bread back to life.
- The nigh effective hack is spraying your loaf with h2o and baking it.
Fact: Unless y'all're feeding a crowd, it can be tough to finish upward an entire loaf of breadstuff in the brief time it takes your carby goodness to become from fluffy and chewy to dumbo and hard. Simply letting even a slice of that $seven artisan loaf get to waste material would be sad. (And hey, maybe you're not in the mood to make croutons or French toast.) So what can you lot practice?
Turns out, information technology's possible to bring bread that'southward by its prime number back to life. And according to the internet, there are actually lots of ways to do information technology. Whether they all piece of work is some other story, of course. And then I decided to see which method worked best.
(For the record, nosotros're talking about bread tha''s stiff or dry. In one case y'all spot mold, at that place's no turning dorsum. You've gotta toss it.)
Here'south what happened—and how you can do better by your stale bread.
Why Bread Goes Dried
To figure out which method would do the best job of bringing my bread back to life, I thought it would exist helpful to understand what causes bread to plough dry and difficult in the first place.
Did you know that bread starts going dried within minutes of being pulled from the oven?"Equally bread cools, the structure of the starchy carbohydrates start to crystallize," explains Constitute of Food Technologists past president Roger Clemens, Ph.D. This crystallization process occurs as the bread loses moisture and heat. It's actually a practiced thing, because information technology'due south what helps piping hot, fresh breadstuff firm upwards enough so you tin piece it. But equally more moisture is lost, more of those starch crystals class, and the bread starts to turn stale.
The skilful news is that adding oestrus and moisture dorsum into breadstuff can make it soft and chewy once more. To a point, anyhow. "In many cases, the staff of life won't be 100 percent, simply it will all the same exist palatable," Clemens says.
The Best Ways to Revive Stale Bread
Armed with this knowledge, I decided to put a few popular stale bread hacks to the test. Hither'southward a look at what worked—and what didn't.
Method 1: Put bread in a bag with some celery.
Will tucking a sad loaf into a handbag with a stalk of celery and letting the 2 hang out overnight give you delicious bread? Some folks say yeah, only I was pretty skeptical. Celery does comprise a lot of water, and it's possible for dry out bread to absorb some of that moisture. But information technology nonetheless didn't seem like the best choice because at that place was no heat involved.
And indeed, my celery bread wasn't the most succulent. I let the two sit in a rolled-up paper handbag for virtually viii hours. The bread was noticeably softer every bit a result but in a soggy, damp, unappetizing sort of way. Also, it smelled like celery.
Method 2: Microwave bread with a damp paper towel.
Wrapping breadstuff in a damp paper towel surrounds it with moisture, and the microwave adds heat. So, in theory, you should have all the elements yous need to bring dying bread back to life, correct?
Still, the results were underwhelming. Enshrouding the bread and microwaving it for one minute did make my stale half-loaf noticeably softer with more moisture. But instead of getting pleasantly crisp, the chaff turned soft as well. If that doesn't bother you lot, and then this method works, simply I thought it was meh.
Method 3: Wrap bread in foil and bake it.
This technique seemed like a step in the right direction. The foil wrapping seemed like information technology would trap some steam equally the breadstuff warmed up, yielding a softer texture. And letting the loaf hang out in a 375-caste oven for x minutes seemed like information technology would add enough heat to get the outside nice and well-baked.
It definitely worked improve than the other two tricks. The crust got fairly crisp, which I liked. The downside was that the remainder of the staff of life kind of dried out too. So it didn't exactly brand the texture fresh. Instead, it merely turned the clock back by a day or and so.
Method 4: Spritz bread with water and bake it.
This hack, which was basically like method No. 3 but with one extra step, seemed like it would be the holy grail. Before wrapping my breadstuff in foil and baking, I used a spray bottle to lightly spritz the crust with water. I had a feeling this would add dorsum some of the wet that my bread had lost, yielding a loaf that was crisp on the outside and soft on the inside.
Was it perfect? No—this didn't gustatory modality exactly like the breadstuff I had bought from my local bakery four days before. But it was pretty close! Out of all the methods I tried, this one was far and away the winner.
The Lesser Line
You demand two things to revive stale bread: moisture and heat. Misting the crust lightly with water, wrapping the loaf in foil, and baking at 375 degrees for 10 minutes delivered both of these key elements and fabricated my four-day-sometime breadstuff taste relatively fresh.
Of course, it would be fifty-fifty meliorate if yous could keep the bread from going dried in the starting time place. It'southward incommunicable to make bread terminal forever, but if y'all know it'll be a few days earlier you plan to finish up that loaf, consider sticking it in the freezer. (These instructions tell you lot exactly how to exercise information technology.) That will help dull the loss of moisture so your staff of life is fresher whenever you lot'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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