Read on. This step might seem terrifying at first, but stay with us. Turn on a faucet of running water—either hot or cold will do—and stick that loaf of bread right under it. Try to position it so the exposed or cut-side is facing away from the faucet, but if the loaf's interior gets wet, fear not. Food director Carla Music has performed this trick with a totally saturated loaf to great success. Don't be timid; get the crust good and wet before proceeding. The good news is that adding heat and moisture back into bread can make it soft and chewy once again.
To a point, anyway. Armed with this knowledge, I decided to put a few popular stale bread hacks to the test. 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. 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.
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.
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. Over the years, food scientists have published hundreds of papers on the subject. Many have come to believe the process has to do with starch within the gluten structure. Spiderwebs of amylose then attach to the gluten network.
As the crumb sheds moisture, these webs stiffen. Some bread manufacturers extend shelf life by adding enzymes that sever these amylose strands, or by way of additives that inhibit starch from interacting with gluten. A quick note, as we mentioned above, bread turning stale is just a quality issue, it does not impact the safety of your bread. If you store bread outside of plastic in a non-humid room temperature environment, most breads turn stale, very stale, well before they ever spoil because of the growth of microorganisms.
Just about every bread will stale over time, if you leave it enough time. There are several ways to significantly slow down the process though. First of all, do not store a freshly baked bread in the fridge. Whereas storing bread in the fridge slows down growth of micro organisms, it actually speeds up the starch retrogradation process. In other words, it speeds up staling of bread.
A commonly used method to prevent staling is by partially breaking down those complex starch molecules. You can break up starch molecules using specialized enzymes : amylases. It is also well documented that sourdough breads can be kept several days longer without them turning stale and becoming inedible!
It is thought that the bacteria in the sourdough have a similar mode of action as the enzymes discussed above. They break up some of the starch and even protein molecules, decreasing the extent of staling. Since every type of bacteria is slightly different, different sourdoughs will have a different impact.
Fat can slow down retrogradation by sitting in between all those starch molecules, preventing them from forming that more crystalline structure. Despite all your efforts, your bread might still turn stale. But hope is not yet lost! There are a lot of ways to still use this bread. Most of these methods will use some sort of heating process to revamp your bread since heat can reverse starch retrogradation almost completely. If your unsliced loaf has turned stale, all you need to do it reheat it.
Do keep in mind that reheating your loaf can make the crust thicker which some might consider a benefit and that the required time strongly depends on the size of your loaf. The oven will simply dry them out. The oven will dry out that bread, making it crunchy and hard. Instead, you had best turn to the microwave for help! A microwave heats food by heating up all the water molecules. Take your day-old naan or pita and reheat it in the microwave for seconds exact time depends on your microwave settings.
The microwave will reverse the starch crystallization processes without drying out the bread. You naan will be soft and warm!
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