Daily Express demonstrates food storage hack for bread
There’s nothing worse than going back to a loaf of bread and realising that it’s gone stale – or even worse, mouldy.
Bread is a household staple with 99.8 percent adding it to their shopping baskets, totalling nearly 11 million loaves sold each day in the UK.
But with the recent spike in temperature the UK is experiencing, it can be hard to know where to store a loaf of bread.
Express.co.uk spoke exclusively to Joe Hurd, TV chef, ingredients expert, and ambassador of Lifetime Training’s Chef Academy, to gather his expert knowledge on how bread should be stored.
He insisted that households should “always” store bread either in a bread bin or a cupboard, and away from fridges, ovens, dishwashers and any appliance that generates any form of warmth. Joe warned: “This will send your bread mouldy quickly.”
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The chef recommends wrapping bread in paper, rather than clingfilm to keep it fresh. Joe explained that he used to do use clingfilm, but it just “increases the moisture/humidity which leads to mould”.
However, paper is a better option as it will allow a little air to reach the loaf “without making it stale so quickly”. Air is allowed to circulate around the bread in the bag, keeping it crustier for longer. The crust helps to maintain more moisture in the crumb.
Joe added: “Basically, keep bread away from moist/warm/damp parts of the house, keep it covered but not smothered, in a cool dry area of the kitchen.”
Certain conditions definitely make bread more susceptible to mould, and these conditions are exactly what needs to be avoided.
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If a home is particularly warm and humid, the bread is likely to mould relatively quickly if it is not stored very well.
Aside from a warm area in the home, Joe advises against storing bread in a place many often keep their bread.
He urged: “Do not refrigerate. The reason we wouldn’t refrigerate bread is that the starch in the loaf will start to recrystallise, which means you will lose moisture and flavour.”
For those who tend to get through their bread slowly, a better option is to freeze it – this keeps the loaf edible while preventing the spread of mould.
For storing bread both long-term and short-term, the freezer is a great place to store it.
To freeze bread “well”, Joe recommends simply wrapping the bread in a freezer or zip lock bag and then defrosting it in the fridge as “this will stop it going soggy”.
When it comes to defrosting it, he said: “Personally, I put frozen bread in my air fryer and it comes back to life amazingly well!”
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