Do not store your bread in the refrigerator. Store only as much bread as you can eat, before it goes bad, wrapped up, on the counter. Tightly wrap and freeze the rest of it. To thaw, take out as many pieces as you will need, and put them in a ziplock bag on the counter to thaw. Do not put them in the refrigerator. Read below to find out why.
Wheat flour, the primary ingredient (along with water and yeast) of bread dough, is packed full of granules of starch. That starch, in its natural state, is largely in crystalline form, meaning the starch molecules are arranged in a defined geometric structure. Once mixed with water to form a dough and baked in the oven at high temperatures, the crystalline structure of the starch breaks down as the starch absorbs water and becomes increasingly amorphous (meaning the starch molecules have no clearly defined structure).
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.
The reason a refrigerator is bad for bread: When bread is stored in a cold (but above freezing) environment, this recrystallization, and therefore staling, happens much faster than at warmer temperatures. Freezing, however, dramatically slows the process down.
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