- 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.
Fact: Unless you're feeding a crowd, it can be tough to finish up an entire loaf of bread in the brief time it 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 would be sad. (And hey, maybe you’re not in the mood to make croutons or French toast.) So what can you do?
Turns out, it'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 course. So I decided to see which method worked best.
(For the record, we're talking about bread tha'’s stiff or dry. Once you spot mold, there's no turning back. You've gotta toss it.)
Here's what happened—and how you can do better by your stale bread.
Why Bread Goes Stale
To figure out which method would do the best job 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 first place.
Did you know that bread starts going stale within minutes of being pulled from the oven?"As bread cools, the structure of the starchy carbohydrates start to crystallize," explains Institute of Food Technologists past president Roger Clemens, Ph.D. This crystallization process occurs as the bread loses moisture and heat. It’s actually a good thing, because it’s what helps piping hot, fresh bread firm up enough so you can slice it. But as more moisture is lost, more of those starch crystals form, and the bread starts to turn stale.
The good news is that adding heat and moisture back into bread can make it soft and chewy once again. To a point, anyway. "In many cases, the bread won’t be 100 percent, but it will still be 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. Here's a look at what worked—and what didn't.
Method 1: Put bread in a bag with some celery.
This method works, but your bread will smell like celery. Shutterstock/mama_mia
Will tucking a sad loaf into a bag with a stalk of celery and letting the two hang out overnight give you delicious bread? Some folks say yes, but I was pretty skeptical. Celery does contain a lot of water, and it’s possible for dry bread to absorb some of that moisture. But it still didn’t seem like the best option because there was no heat involved.
And indeed, my celery bread wasn’t the most delicious. I let the two sit in a rolled-up paper bag for about eight hours. The bread was noticeably softer as 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.
This method works but the crust will also turn soft. Zynatis/Shutterstock
Wrapping bread in a damp paper towel surrounds it with moisture, and the microwave adds heat. So, in theory, you 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 it for one minute did make my stale half-loaf noticeably softer with more moisture. But instead of getting pleasantly crisp, the crust turned soft too. If that doesn't bother you, then this method works, but I thought it was meh.
Method 3: Wrap bread in foil and bake it.
This hack will keep your bread crisp but also dry out your bread. Robert F. Bukaty/AP
This technique seemed like a step in the right direction. The foil wrapping seemed like it would trap some steam as the bread warmed up, yielding a softer texture. And letting the loaf hang out in a 375-degree oven for 10 minutes seemed like it would add enough heat to get the outside nice and crisp.
It definitely worked better than the other two tricks. The crust 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 day or so.
Method 4: Spritz bread with water and bake it.
This is the best method for reviving stale bread. Christian Guthier/Flickr
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 bread in foil and baking, 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 crisp on the outside and soft on the inside.
Was it perfect? No—this didn't taste exactly like the bread I had bought from my local bakery four 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
You 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 10 minutes delivered both of these key elements and made my four-day-old bread taste relatively fresh.
Of course, it would be even better if you could keep the bread from going stale in the first place. 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.) That will help slow the loss of moisture so your bread is fresher whenever you’re ready to eat it.
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Three simple and easy ways to save your stale bread. There are few things that are as delicious as a fresh baked loaf of bread hot out of the oven. It's also hard to eat an entire loaf of bread while it is at it's freshest. Keeping bread fresh is a losing battle, from the moment it is done baking it begins to lose it's moisture through a process called starch retrogradation. In the original baking process, the starch began to gelatinize above 150F and absorb moisture. Once absorbed, the starches swell and create the spongy fresh solid texture we associate with bread. As the starches recrystallize over time they loose the moisture that was once locked in in the baking process. By simply reheating your bread your starches will re-gelatinize and reinstall the soft texture we have come to associate with "fresh".
This Instructable will cover three different methods for remoistening your stale bread.
You'll need the following to help rescue your stale bread:
Stale Loaf of Bread
Paper Towels
Aluminum Foil
1-2 Celery Stalks
Oven
Microwave
This method is by far the fastest way to soften your stale bread and has the longest lasting results.
Steps:
Moisten a section of paper towel long enough to completely cover your loaf of bread (or the portion that you intend to eat). Do so by soaking your paper towel in cold water, and then squeeze out as much of the water as you can.
Wrap your portion of bread in your damp paper towel snuggly.
Place your covered loaf or slice into your microwave.
Microwave for 10 seconds.
Remove your bread from the microwave.
Remove it's paper towel covering.
Serve!
The oven method takes longer to soften the bread than the microwave method but works just as well.
Steps:
Preheat your oven to 300F (148.8C).
Tear off a piece of aluminum foil large enough to cover and wrap your bread loaf/slice in.
Wrap your bread in the aluminum taking care to make sure it is completely covered.
Place your foil covered bread into your warm oven for 5-20 minutes. If you are just heating a slice or small roll, you'll want to warm it for less time (closer to 5 minutes) than if you are warming and remoistening a larger or thicker loaf of bread (closer to 20 minutes).
Remove your bread from the oven and allow it to cool within the foil. You'll want to let your bread remoisten inside the foil so that as it cools it doesn't release it's remaining moisture as steam.
Serve and eat as soon as it's cool enough to touch.
If your bread is really dry, I occasionally dab a couple drops of water along the length of the bread loaf with my fingers. This will help to reincorporate moisture into your loaf beyond just reheating and softening. If you decide to add water, make sure that you don't over saturate your bread loaf otherwise you'll end up with mushy bread. Start small, you can always add more.
The celery method is preferential for remoistening bags of sliced bread; however, it takes a little bit of foresight since you'll be letting it reabsorb moisture overnight.
Steps:
Slide a celery stalk inside your bread loaf bag.
Seal or close off your bag.
Place your bread bag with celery stalk back into the fridge and let it sit for several hours. I have had the best results when it sits overnight in the fridge.
Remove your celery stalk from the bag. It should be fairly dry and tough by this point having lost most of it's moisture the bread.
There is the possibility that your bread has dried out beyond reasonable or easy remoistening. If this is the case, try reusing your bread in other ways: make bread crumbs, make croutons, thicken a soup, or feed the birds!