1,536 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

This site uses only a few technical cookies necessary for its operation. By continuing to browse, you accept their use.
To find out more...

The preservation of bread

Eating fresh bread is always a delight, the crust crumbles deliciously, you take full advantage of the taste of your bread (80% of this taste is in the crust), it is a fleeting moment to enjoy.
Who hasn't already eaten the crouton or croutons of his baguette, on the way back from the bakery?

Unfortunately, after a few hours, it gets a bit spoiled, the bread naturally softens, and later on it dries out again.

Let's see what happens and how to try to limit it.

14 K 4.7/5 (14 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Bread Preservation Baking Bag Canvas Cotton Linen Crust Crumb

Last modified on: June 11^th 2022

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

The preservation of bread

Out of the oven

pain bien cuit

The bread is unbaked, it leaves the oven which is at 250°C approximately, and will wait on a rack or a grid a few minutes before going on the shelves, it is what the bakers call "ressuage".
It cools down slowly, especially if it is a big piece, and for the moment it remains crispy, no secret it is the best time to taste it!

With time comes the staling

Then, as time goes by, some of the moisture that is contained in the heart of the bread by the cooking, will slowly migrate from the crumb (center) to the crust (periphery), it does not change its taste, but the crust softens and the initial crispness goes away...
You can't do anything against that, it's in the order of things in baking, but note that it's not as fast on a well or very well baked bread, as on a poorly or under baked one.
It must even happen, in time, the bread must evacuate some of its water otherwise it becomes elastic.
This softening is also accentuated by a poor quality of bread (flours, workmanship, fermentation), you may have already seen those tragic undercooked and softened baguettes, with which it is possible to tie a knot without breaking it.

But no bread escapes it, that's how it starts to stale more or less quickly: It ends up losing almost all its internal moisture to become dry.

pain rassi

What to do?

As I said, we cannot prevent, but we can limit, a little, the staling in time, here are some tracks:

- I have already mentioned it, but it is important to remember, a well baked bread will keep longer than a bread that is not
- A sourdough bread will keep better and longer than a yeast bread
- A well-baked sourdough bread, even better.
- Once the bread has cooled down (this is very important), you can store it in something closed, the ancients used a bread bin, a kind of wooden box lined with cloth, and we would tend to use a plastic bag now.

It's a mistake to use a plastic bag, because it keeps your bread soft, but it quickly becomes rubbery, and your bread needs to breathe anyway.
A much better solution is a canvas bag (cotton, linen...), it keeps your bread in good conditions, letting it breathe without letting it completely dry as if it was in the open air.

sac à pain

You can buy one of course, but if you know how to saw, which I don't, a cotton bread bag is (I'm told) a pretty easy thing to do.

Dry bread?

If you find yourself with dry bread one day, don't throw it away, in fact we should never throw away bread, it was just unthinkable with my grandparents' generation.
Here are a few ways to use it anyway:

- There is dry and dry, put it in the toaster, and what you thought was dry might become soft enough for a breakfast sandwich
- Dry enough? Make French toast out of it, or quiche, or croutons
- Too dry? Turn it into homemade breadcrumbs

To sum up: Staling and drying of bread is normal, but you can limit staling by storing bread in a canvas bag (not plastic).

Lasts posts

Butter vs. grease

We often read in a recipe where a pastry is put into a mould that, just before pouring, the mould should be buttered or greased. But what's the difference between these 2 terms?
December 1^st 20256055

Getting out of the fridge early

Very often when you're cooking, you need to take food or preparations out of the fridge, to use them in the recipe in progress. There's nothing tricky about this: you just take them out of the fridge and use them, usually immediately, in the recipe. But is this really a good method?
November 24^th 20259395

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 2025841

Oven height

When we put a dish or cake in the oven, we naturally tend to put it on the middle shelf, and that's what we usually do. But in some cases, this position and height can be a little tricky, so let's find out why.
October 8^th 20252,4275

The importance of sieving

In recipes that use a fine powder (flour, powdered sugar, etc.), you'll often see the advice to sift before using it. To sift is to pass the powder in question through a sieve (a very fine strainer) before incorporating it into your recipe. It's often advice, but is it really useful?
September 3^rd 20257,3203

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

From website to blog

Hello everyone, Today I'm inaugurating the cooking-ez.com "blog". The idea is to have a space for discussion open to everone, but not necessarily linked to a particular recipe or page. I hope the posts will be sufficiently interesting that you'll enjoy reading and discussing them. The...
January 1^st 201121 K3.9

The first breads of humanity?

I have already told you in a previous article the beautiful story of the croissants, but do you know what it is about the bread, who "invented" it, where and when? Well, you can imagine that recent discoveries, in 2018, have profoundly changed the history of bread.
February 16^th 201914 K5

Do you know Yotam Ottolenghi?

Do you know Yotam Ottolenghi? Maybe not, in which case let me tell you a little about him.
December 19^th 20207,9294.8

The return of the "Norman hole"

You maybe know the "trou normand", this old gastronomic custom typically French which consists in taking a (small) glass of calvados, generally between the last course and the dessert? It's something that seems a bit anachronistic nowadays, having a glass of an alcohol of more than 60° in the...
December 18^th 202114 K4.8

The "pith" of the cauliflower

When using cauliflower in a recipe, there is a lot of preparation work at the beginning: removing the leaves, taking the tops or florets, etc. It's a bit tedious, but in the end you're left with the best of the cauliflower, ready to be used in your recipe.
February 5^th 202214 K4.9