What makes bread stale

Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. Amylose and amylopectin both retrograde slightly differently. The retrogradation of amylose sets in more quickly than that of amylopectin and is less reversible than than of amylopectin as well.

Luckily, some of these structures can be reversed by heat, which opens up some ways to revamp your stale bread. 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. But even with added fat, as the bread dries out, there is less water to keep the chains apart, making it increasingly easy for the chains to meet up again. Some people's instant reaction is to chuck it out. However, you can 'revive' stale bread. Just heating it up a little in a microwave will do the job well. The heating causes the chains to flex out of their parallel state and the bread becomes edible again.

However, you don't get all that long, as you'll lose some water when you re-heat the bread, allowing it to go stale that much quicker. Whatever you do, don't throw it away! You can use it for toast and some people say that slightly stale bread makes better toast than fresh or as a 'trencher' for some kind of moist, hot food on top, such as a casserole.

You can find other ideas for enjoying stale bread in Slow Dough: Real Bread and our free recipes section. As well as the doughiness issue, slicing hot bread too soon will cut short the 'carry over' cooking that completes the baking after removing a loaf from the oven, and allows much more steam to escape. Allowing the bread to cool means more of this water will be kept in the loaf, helping it to stay moister longer.

It is often said that cooled bread is more digestible, though we have yet to see any research that supports this belief. Originally published in True Loaf magazine issue 10, January More articles. Recycling allows the bread to be salvaged so that it can be consumed and preserved. Bread typically forms a slightly thick crust on the outside that keeps the inside moist and fresh.

If the outside crust is exposed too much to the air, it will begin to go stale and harden so that the inside of the bread cannot be cut into or would be unsatisfying to consume. Fresh bread that is sliced and then exposed to air only has a matter of around 30 to 60 minutes before the bread begins to show slight signs of being stale, such as being hard to the touch and crumbling.

When bread goes stale it is caused by a chemical reaction in which the food is slowly beginning to rot or go bad. Because bread has a high amount of starch in it, it can quickly crystallize in cooler temperatures such as in a refrigerator, cool porch or basement during a process called retrogradation. The reason why retrogradation increases rapidly in locations that are constantly kept cool is because of the added amount of crystals that form when the bread is exposed to cool, moist air.

The formation of crystals cause the bread to dry out faster leaving the edges hard, crunchy and difficult to bite into.