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Category: Cooking & Food
Making the Most Out of That "Day-Old" Bread:
Whether we arrive home with the dented cans or the meat on special in our grocery bags, there are other ways to "pay" when we pinch pennies on discount items at the supermarket. Discounted day-old bakery bread ranks high on the list of those food items with a short useful life left once home from the store. While those with more lavish budgets get promising returns with fresh bakery bread, others who intend to save a few cents must prepare themselves to consume a whole loaf of bargain bread in 24 hours if they want to, "Have their soft bread and eat it too." The solution for those with slightly more moderate appetites lies in the ability to reconstitute some of that lost moisture once bakery bread gets that hard quality after a few days. The following simple steps turn leftover bread bound for the trash or fated to be a doorstop back to its original, soft and chewy state.
When you've determined that your day(s)-old bread is no longer edible and needs its softness back:
First set your oven to 275 degrees.
Take a clean dish towel and soak it in the sink.
Wring the dish towel out several times so that it's damp, but not dripping.
Wrap the damp towel loosely around your entire loaf of bread, or what's left after a few snacks, so that the towel clings to the bread.
Place the swaddled bread on a baking sheet and pop it in the oven for ten minutes. Watch your time carefully, as the towel will be drying out quickly in the oven and will start to smoke if left for too long!!
After ten minutes, take the bread out, remove the towel, and check to see how much moisture is back in the loaf and whether the bread feels pliable. If it is not to your liking, make the towel damp again and return the bread to the oven for another few minutes.
This process should reconstitute a lot of the lost moisture in your bread so that it feels soft enough to be coming straight from the bakery. A final "preservation" step is to store your bread, as many of us already do, in an airtight container.
Your days should feel more accomplished and you should have a spring in your step when you have the power to retrieve day-old bread from its rocklike state. As a greater social service, this tip, when used successfully, allows the penny pinchers, starving students, and coupon crazies of the world a simple "doctoring" technique for their discount bread. As for those other pay-full-price, who-me?-buy-day-old?!, less-than-resourceful shoppers, they may never know the pleasure of stacking up all the dimes they saved as they casually tear off a hunk of chewy baguette bread that lived an extra-long life and was eaten down to the last crumb.
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Submitted By
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Laurie Bazemore |
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