Hollywood is not wrong that moisture loss is bad for bread, it’s not the primary reason to avoid refrigerating bread. The science: Refrigeration speeds up the starches’ return to a more organized crystalline structure (also known as retrogradation), which means it hardens (i.e. stales) far faster.
Unrefrigerated bread does typically get moldy faster. The trade-off is longevity over texture, and many consumers are more concerned with stretching their bread (and their metaphorical bread) as far as possible, especially these days.
To which we say, fair. And also: freeze! Becky wrote a helpful guide to storing bread in that other section of your favorite appliance. She says the freezer “serves as a kind of pause button, meaning fresh bread you move into cold storage can come out almost as good as the day you put it in.”
Serious Eats also covered the issue to the same conclusion a while ago: https://www.seriouseats.com/does-refrigeration-really-ruin-bread
I put sliced bread in the freezer and thaw slices as I need them in my toaster. Works pretty well, haven’t thrown away moldy bread since I started doing that
I typically keep it at room temperature. And if for some reason I’m not planning to eat it in the near future, I either freeze it (homemade) or toast it (store-bought). Toasts are always welcome in my plate, and I can convert them into breadcrumbs if necessary/desired.
Frozen bread is magical. Microwaving it for a short time is all it takes to go from frozen to perfect. It’s honestly amazing. No need to put the bread in the fridge at all - just freeze the whole loaf and defrost slices when you need them.
This is the way.
@memfree I’m keeping my bread in the fridge, but in the bag I bought it in. This way, water has no place to evaporate to.
– but moisture isn’t the problem. From Serious Eats:
As the bread cools, however, those starches begin to slowly regroup into a more ordered, crystalline structure again, and it’s this gradual return (“retrogradation”) to the crystal state (“recrystallization”) that causes bread to harden and grow stale. This process is so central to staling, in fact, that even bread that has been hermetically sealed to prevent all moisture loss will still harden and turn stale.
@memfree I see. I never had this problem fwiw
your fridge bread stales quicker than it would in room temperature, that’s just a fact.
