[Sca-cooks] French bread, was Cheese, warm or cold

[Terry Decker]

A fairly dense uncut loaf of wheat bread with a hard, thick crust will
retain moisture for about four days.  A truly massive loaf such as the 4
pound country loaves may hold moisture even longer.  Uncut rye bread seems
to last forever.  In my experience, this holds true whether the bread is
made with sourdough or yeast.

The key is mostly the crust.  A heavy crust slows the dehydration of the
crumb.  If you wrap the bread in plastic, the plastic will retain moisture
on the outside of the loaf and soften the crust allowing more moisture to
escape.  It also makes mold a greater issue.

Exceptionally dry climates or cold climates cause additional dehydration
which will make the bread grow stale faster, which is why refrigeration and
freezing are hard on bread.  You can freeze bread and thaw it successful, so
that most people can't tell it has been frozen, but it requires air tight
packaging and proper thawing and reheating.

Fats provide softening because they are soft solids initially.  The retain
their basic characteristics even during dehydration.  They also provide a
better starter for molds than basic bread.

Of course the best way to keep bread from drying out is to have friends who
want to save you from that fate.

Bear


>Really? That's interesting. Does Lionel do a simple
>flour/leaven/salt/water dough, or does he add any oils/fats? I'm not the
>best bread baker in the world, but when I do a bread with little or no
>fats, it tends to get hard quickly, whereas breads with fats stay soft
>longer.
>
>-- Pani Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net