Tricks to Make Bread Moist Again
- It is hard to finish a whole loaf of bread before it goes stale.
- At that place are a few different hacks which can bring your dried bread dorsum to life.
- The virtually effective hack is spraying your loaf with water and blistering it.
Fact: Unless you're feeding a oversupply, it tin be tough to finish upwards an unabridged loaf of bread in the cursory time it takes your carby goodness to get from fluffy and chewy to dense and hard. Just letting even a slice of that $vii artisan loaf go to waste would be sad. (And hey, possibly yous're non in the mood to make croutons or French toast.) So what can y'all practise?
Turns out, information technology's possible to bring bread that's past its prime back to life. And according to the internet, there are actually lots of ways to do it. Whether they all work is another story, of class. And so I decided to see which method worked best.
(For the record, we're talking about breadstuff tha''s stiff or dry. Once you spot mold, there'due south no turning dorsum. You've gotta toss it.)
Here'southward what happened—and how you tin do amend by your dried breadstuff.
Why Bread Goes Stale
To figure out which method would do the best job of bringing my breadstuff back to life, I idea it would exist helpful to understand what causes breadstuff to turn dry out and hard in the first place.
Did you know that staff of life starts going stale within minutes of being pulled from the oven?"As bread cools, the structure of the starchy carbohydrates start to crystallize," explains Plant of Food Technologists past president Roger Clemens, Ph.D. This crystallization procedure occurs as the bread loses moisture and rut. Information technology's actually a good thing, considering it'south what helps piping hot, fresh breadstuff business firm up enough so you tin piece information technology. But every bit more wet is lost, more of those starch crystals form, and the bread starts to plow stale.
The good news is that adding heat and moisture back into bread can brand it soft and chewy again. To a point, anyway. "In many cases, the staff of life won't be 100 percent, but it volition even so be palatable," Clemens says.
The Best Ways to Revive Dried Bread
Armed with this knowledge, I decided to put a few pop stale staff of life hacks to the test. Here'southward a wait at what worked—and what didn't.
Method 1: Put bread in a bag with some celery.
Volition tucking a sorry loaf into a bag with a stalk of celery and letting the 2 hang out overnight give you lot delicious breadstuff? Some folks say yes, merely I was pretty skeptical. Celery does contain a lot of h2o, and it's possible for dry staff of life to blot some of that moisture. But it still didn't seem similar the best option because at that place was no heat involved.
And indeed, my celery breadstuff wasn't the well-nigh delicious. I let the two sit in a rolled-upward newspaper pocketbook for almost eight hours. The bread was noticeably softer as a result only in a soggy, damp, unappetizing sort of way. Also, information technology smelled like celery.
Method 2: Microwave bread with a damp paper towel.
Wrapping bread in a damp paper towel surrounds it with wet, and the microwave adds heat. Then, in theory, you lot should have all the elements you need to bring dying bread back to life, right?
Still, the results were underwhelming. Enshrouding the bread and microwaving information technology for one infinitesimal did make my dried half-loaf noticeably softer with more moisture. But instead of getting pleasantly crisp, the chaff turned soft also. If that doesn't bother you, and so this method works, simply I idea it was meh.
Method three: Wrap bread in foil and bake it.
This technique seemed similar a step in the right direction. The foil wrapping seemed like it would trap some steam equally the bread warmed up, yielding a softer texture. And letting the loaf hang out in a 375-degree oven for 10 minutes seemed similar information technology would add enough heat to get the outside dainty and crisp.
Information technology definitely worked better than the other two tricks. The crust got fairly well-baked, which I liked. The downside was that the rest of the staff of life kind of dried out as well. So information technology didn't exactly brand the texture fresh. Instead, it but turned the clock back by a day or so.
Method 4: Spritz breadstuff with h2o and bake information technology.
This hack, which was basically similar method No. 3 but with one actress step, seemed similar information technology would exist 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 back some of the moisture that my bread had lost, yielding a loaf that was well-baked on the outside and soft on the inside.
Was it perfect? No—this didn't taste exactly like the staff of life I had bought from my local bakery iv days earlier. But it was pretty close! Out of all the methods I tried, this one was far and away the winner.
The Bottom Line
Yous need 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 x minutes delivered both of these central elements and made my four-twenty-four hour period-sometime breadstuff taste relatively fresh.
Of course, it would be even better if you lot could go on the bread from going stale in the first place. It'south impossible to brand breadstuff last forever, simply if you know it'll exist a few days before you plan to finish upward that loaf, consider sticking information technology in the freezer. (These instructions tell you exactly how to practice information technology.) That will assistance slow the loss of wet then your bread 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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