Paul Hollywood is right: Don’t refrigerate bread
Paul Hollywood is right: Don’t refrigerate bread
The “Great British Baking Show” judge told TikTok viewers that you shouldn’t store bread in the refrigerator. Despite some backlash, he’s right.
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
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.
My only issue with frozen bread is that I always forget it is in the freezer and it ends up being there for months until I am unsure if it is okay to eat it
This is the way.
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.
@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
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Over the decades, the appliance has fundamentally changed the way Americans shop, cook and eat, and they’re undeniably handy for prolonging the life of so many foods (yes, including tomatoes!
Paul Hollywood, the cookbook author, TV personality and “Great British Baking Show” judge, recently posted a video on TikTok in which he proclaimed that the correct method of storage for bread is not inside an icebox.
We’ve been telling readers this for years: A 1996 test by The Washington Post of various bread-storing methods concluded that “about the worst thing you can do is refrigerate the bread.”
Science notwithstanding, it seems that Team Fridge is strong, and plenty of commenters took issue with the instructions from the guy who should know — after all, you don’t get called “the King of Bread” for nothing.
“You don’t want to put bread in the fridge, ever,” Andrew Janjigian, author of the bread-focused Wordloaf newsletter, told my colleague Aaron Hutcherson last year.
For a crusty loaf, Janjigian prefers to store it cut-side down on the cutting board — a technique that my colleague Becky Krystal also employs at home.
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