Stop Wrapping Bread In Plastic And Try This Trick To Keeping It Fresh Instead

Bread is a type of food that is impacted massively by the way in which you store it. While storing fresh bread in plastic is a well-known blunder, even store-bought bread — which is often sold within a plastic bag — should be kept elsewhere if you want it to last as long as possible at its ideal quality. Instead, the key to maintaining your bread well is to keep it within a cloth or paper bag.

The reason that cloth and paper work so well is due to them both giving your bread a perfect medium in terms of air exposure. Bread exposed to dry air for too long — which happens when it's put in the fridge, for example — loses its moisture and becomes incredibly stale. Alternatively, bread enclosed in plastic wrap or a plastic bag locks in the baked goods' moisture, resulting in bread that could become damp and moldy. That's why, with the use of things like a cloth or paper bag, the proper amount of air can reach the bread itself to prevent it from molding but without staling the bread altogether.

When it comes to the best option between storing your bread in cloth or paper, the answer is typically the former, but it depends on how you do it; some find that merely wrapping bread in a towel and leaving it on the counter, for example, doesn't do the trick well enough. However, using a breathable linen bread bag that can be sealed does a great job of letting in air without allowing it to actively dry out the bread. This is the major flaw of paper bags, which have great air circulation but will get stale much faster as a result, compared to being in a linen bag.

With this in mind, you might benefit even more if you put your linen-clad bread in a breadbox, although you'd need to ensure the box has good ventilation to prevent mold from growing due to a lack of air. Or if you're looking for long-term storage, wrapping fresh bread in freezer paper and freezing it is the safest and most logical way to maintain your bread's quality for longer than five days.