I had something like this in Verbier, Switzerland. Cubes of stale bread are the perfect sponge for all that great dressing in this Italian bread salad. Stale bread makes a great thickener for soups, whether you crumble it or use it in big, thick chunks, like in ribollita.
Shred stale bread into crumbs and mix into your meatballs. Trust us—homemade breadcrumbs are WAY better than store-bought. Toss 3 cups torn 1-inch pieces stale bread with 3 tablespoons olive oil on a baking sheet; season with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper.
Really stale bread makes a perfect roasting bed for whole chickens—a perfect way to catch all those delicious drippings. Stuffing and dressing isn't just for Thanksgiving! It's also a great side for when you have stale bread on-hand. Do that by first preheating the oven to degrees Fahrenheit. This low temperature will help to rehydrate the bread rather than drying it out too much and making it crispy. Then, you want to run your loaf under water briefly. Just get the outside wet.
You can also use a damp cloth and wet it down. Put your loaf onto a baking sheet and heat it for about 7 minutes to make it dry on the outside. This may take a few minutes longer for larger, wetter loaves of bread. This works for a lot of different kinds of bread. You can use this method if you are wondering how to soften stale French bread, baguettes, white bread and more.
What do you do if you want to soften just a single slice of bread or a dinner roll? What I suggest is not wetting down the bread or preheating the oven at all. Instead, just use the microwave. Put your bread in for just about seconds and heat it up. This will soften the bread, but it has an unintended side effect. So, if you want to heat up just a small amount of bread, I recommend the microwave for it.
Just make sure you only heat up what you need and no more. Then, consume the bread within a short period of time before it has a chance to harden and become incredibly tough to eat.
You can keep it edible for longer and allow it to be used. Keep in mind that if the bread becomes mouldy, it needs to be tossed rather than eaten. There is always more mould in the bread than what is visible, as the mould spores themselves are invisible to the naked eye. If the bread is mouldy on one end, there is more mould than that in the bread. Preventing, delaying, or even reversing this process is a holy grail of many bread makers and eaters.
A simple loaf of bread is made of at least wheat flour, water, yeast, and probably some salt. The dough you make will be soft and flexible, easy to deform, knead and shape into your desired bread. The heat of the oven causes the proteins to denature, the starches gelatinize, more on that later. Whereas water is spread evenly throughout the dough, that is no longer the case in a baked bread. The crust contains considerably less water than the center, giving it that crunch.
Accompanying all those changes in texture and structure is a change in flavor. While bread is in the oven, sugars and proteins react with one another in the Maillard reaction. This complex set of chemical reactions causes the bread to turn brown and causes the formation of all sorts of aromas and flavors.
When your bread comes out of the oven the high temperatures causes a lot of these to evaporate and get into the air, hitting your nose when you enter that bakery or open that oven door.
Staling sets in very soon after. During staling bread loses its freshness, it loses that crunchy crust and the center turns dry and chewy. A truly stale bread requires a lot of chewing and teeth power to be eaten. Water in most foods has a very strong tendency to move throughout. Energetically, it is best for the water to be distributed evenly, such that the water activity is the same throughout the whole food.
In the case of bread the crust is a lot drier and has a lower water activity than the center of the bread. As such, almost immediately after the bread has cooled down, moisture from the center will move into the crust. In a worst case, eliminating all that crunch in a matter of a few hours! Keep in mind that for all of this to happen only a small amount of water needs to actually move.
Even though moisture has a clear role to role, it only partially explains why bread turns stale and turns dry! Instead, it is because of a molecular reconfiguration of the starch in bread.
Starch is a main component of wheat flour as it is for many other major food sources worldwide such as potatoes , rice, and cassava for instance.
Amylose is a relatively simple molecule, it is a long chain of glucose units. Amylopectin is also made from glucose, but instead of it being a linear chain, it has a more complex branched structure. Every crop contains a slightly different ratio of these two molecules, causing the starch to behave slightly differently. Within flour the starch is present in the form of granules. When dispersed into water, these granules absorb moisture think of mixing flour with water.
Once you heat up these granules they will start swelling up and absorb some more moisture. Whereas previously they were crystalline, they lose some of this crystallinity, meaning they become more unordered in structure. No need to understand the details, but it is important to know it happens in order to understand staling.
At some point, the granules break, releasing mostly amylose into the rest of the dough. This whole process is called gelatinization. Once gelatinization has occurred it is irreversible.
Freshly gelatinized starch is delicious, think of a freshly baked bread, freshly cooked rice or a just baked potato. However, over time, the starch changes again, which causes your bread to turn stale, the potato to become chewy and dry and the rice to be firmer. During the staling of bread, starch again changes it configuration.
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