Bread outside the fridge spoils fast. Bread in the fridge lasts longer but is less fluffy. In this household we refrigerate our bread and then toast it lightly if we're going to eat it straight. Most of the sandwiches I make are toasted anyway.
My parents used to keep bread in the fridge and I hated it. It always sapped the moisture from the edges and made it stale. I don't know what kind of bread you buy, but mine stays fresh for a very long time on the counter.
Imo, freezing bread is the better option if you want to preserve it for long periods.
It was a particular issue when we were getting fresh bake from the local Nugget. It didn't have preservatives so it was stale after a day or so. At the time we got small quantities and enjoyed it for the day or two after shopping. But we also have other bread used as a stable, say, for sandwiches or morning toast.
Now we live away from Nugget, but still occasionally get fancy bread.
Putting boiling water in the freezer is so useful, like you can cook it once and freeze it, then get it out when you need it and just reheat it a little.
I always thought it was OK to leave salted butter out. Been doing it for years never had a problem I can remember. I also don't eat tons of butter so would guess I've left it out longer than two weeks
I also did that for years, with 5 people in the house we went through softened butter fast.
Then as kids grew up and moved out, I realized it was taking WAY longer to go through. I gave up and leave it in the fridge now. Then again, going through it much slower means that I'm buying much nicer quality butter 😁.
Today's salted butter doesn't have enough salt in it to preserve itself like that.
Back in like Oregon Trail days they would pack butter in enough salt to preserve it for travel, and people got used to the taste (hence why they still make the two types) but today's butter is just not salty enough.
Interesting thanks for the info. Like I said I haven't had any issues so far, but now I think ill pay attention to how long it takes me to go through a stick of butter
This is the first I've heard of a butter bell. I've been leaving salted butter out for years, but I bought a glass food storage container with a snap on lid that is basically the exact size of a stick of butter. I suppose it's accomplishing almost the same thing, although a tiny amount of air does get inside especially as the stick is eaten.
One of my wife's friends got persistently sick last year. She just could not get better. Sometimes she'd be fine for a week or two, but then she'd get sick again. Eventually it came down to her needing to document everything she did each day - and they discovered she was getting sick from warm butter.
Turns out her mom had come over at some point and saw that she refrigerated butter and said "you don't need to do that, it's so much easier to use when warm and it doesn't go bad." Yeah, that's the case if you eat a stick of butter in a few short days. But you can't leave it out for more than that or it starts getting filled with all sorts of germs.
Was it unsalted butter? Salted butter can be left out for a while, certainly more than a few days without concern, but unsalted needs to be refrigerated.
For the last few years, I've been using butter I leave out in a covered butter dish on the counter since I learned that's fine. It's always been a stick of salted butter which I typically finish within 2-3 weeks and that's never caused any problems. I wonder if it being unsalted would really change things that much...
I've been made fun of for thinking butter tastes/feels off after sitting out on the counter, but it absolutely does. If you want soft butter, take it out like an hour before or soften it with heat and whip it back into a homogeneous mixture. I usually cut a pad and melt it on top of whatever I'm making before spreading it. Anything but leaving it on the counter to go bad...
Cheese is a weird one though. Definitely refrigerate cheese.
However, it will develop a stale flavor and texture in the fridge. To prevent this, freeze the bread. Home made bread often molds fast, so refrigerating or freezing the bread is a good option. Store bought bread can stay good for longer, so for the best taste storing it is outside the fridge is best. Source.
Nearly all American sliced white bread is basically flavorless because of the huge amount of dough conditioners they use, so it really doesn't matter if if goes stale in the fridge as long as it lasts through the end of the week and I can have my sandwiches sans mold.
Properly fermented dough becomes a preservative itself. Just like fermented vegetables do. Slapping some fancy label on a packaging doesn't mean the bread was made properly.
We have found that the best way to store bread to maintain the nice texture and consistency is to leave it on a wooden board with the sliced side downwards. The crust seems to protect the inner part well without turning the bread too moist.
Seems counterintuitive, but just leaving it like that on the counter lets the bread stay nice for more than a week.
Yep, its the whole point of a crust right? Like when they baked covered pies to keep the filling fresh...when refrigeration wasn't so readily available
Especially if you only use it for toast, as then it doesn't matter that it goes stale faster in the fridge. Keeps a lot longer in the freezer though, but that has the downside of taking slightly longer to cook, and can be hard to separate sometimes.
If you eat a sandwich or 2 a day you'll go through the loaf faster than it will go stale in the fridge.
Only keep it in the cupboard if you are in low temp/humidity area. If you live in an area thats high temp/humidity and don't run ac constantly its gonna get moldy even faster.
Mold can literally take hold overnight.
Also tortillas make a great alternative for regular bread for a majority of food. And lasts longer in and out of the fridge.
I have found the opposite, a vented breadbin keeps it cool and moisture escapes. put a bag in the fridge and the temp difference brings moisture out and condenses on the inside of bag, then boom mokd next day.
Very much depends on the bread. I wouldn't refridgerate toast or other super white breads, but moist, dark, kernely ryebreads are supposed to be refrigerated. They dry out super easily otherwise.
That's literally not true at all, my family kept butter in a glass container on the kitchen table Lazy Susan. It never lived in the fridge. We did not refrigerate our butter.
I'm certainly not going to waste a whole block of butter to convince you otherwise. Hmmm, I guess I could make a cake... but I don't feel like committing to that
I can't account for your opinions, but I grew up in a home without air conditioning. We kept our butter on the dining room table, in a glass container. We didn't refrigerate it, we used a butter knife to get some for our food.
I was surprised to learn that people ever refrigerate butter, and thought grocery stores did it to extend the life of the butter until someone bought it and brought it home.
I never got sick from the butter to my knowledge. It was never a puddle of liquid either, it was soft and easy to spread.
I'm more shocked to find out most people here aren't echoing any like in kind sentiment. Was my family strange? Is this actually that atypical?
I live in a humid climate (especially in the summer), and if we don't refrigerate our bread and tortillas, or any baked goods, they get moldy in like 4 days.
Good (fresh) bread only lasts a day or two around my house, because it's amazing and delicious and everyone just eats it.
Average commercial everyday bread is going to sit around longer because it's waiting on someone to feel like making a sandwich, or feel like having toast. It's basically a pantry staple hanging out, waiting to get used. The fridge is fine for that.
EDIT I see your edit - I think culture/lifestyle is also playing a fair part here as well. I've spent most of my life living in a rural area where nothing is walkable, so trips to the grocery store were once a week. If I lived in a place I could just walk down the street to a bakery and grab a fresh loaf, that would be different. But just because I don't live in a walkable place doesn't mean I've never had good bread.
Downvoters are brain dead. Science aligns with the taste buds on this one. Freeze your bread, you degenerates! Doesn't take terribly long to thaw, doesn't become dry and stale af like fridge bread.
Hi, it's you from the future, older and wiser, take your fucking bread out of the fridge!
why are you comparing 4-day-old bread to bread fresh from the oven? wow yeah it really doesn't compare, what genius observation. what kind of storage makes it as good as fresh bread from the oven, pray tell?
But don't you get it? Here in the US, we can't do that because we've got to drive an hour to the grocery store once a week (or less)! Uphill, both ways, fording rivers and traversing icy mountain passes! Waaah!
I bake frequently, sometimes bread, sometimes bagels, sometimes sweets. If I leave any homemade goods out on the counter in the summer, they would get moldy even quicker than store-bought.
It's freshly baked daily at my local market, not the kind that sits on a shelf for months. If your bread can't last a few days in the fridge then it's also probably not bread...
If you're anything less than a family of four, leaving bread at room temperature is just eating half a loaf of bread and then throwing away half a loaf of mouldy bread.
Most supermarket bread has indeed already been frozen before you get it.
I even freeze all the cakes from Costco, since they only seem to come in packs of about a thousand.
If I'm going to use the bread in the next couple days? I'll keep it out. Otherwise, I put all my baked goods/bread in the freezer, and extra freezer I bought. Keeps for months. 6+ months if you're lucky and willing to deal with it being overly dry.
yup. tortillas go in the fridge so you can get individual ones easily. Staleness never really bothered me, but i do warm them up on the stove to improve malleability. And i like to get my burritos a little crispy on the outside to help seal the final fold. Now i want burritos...
Chuck them in the microwave or better yet put baking paper (which if i recall correctly you usians call wax paper or parchment paper) in between each tortilla before you freeze it to keep them seperate
Same. I don't get why people act like putting bread in the fridge is world ending. Unless your eating a whole loaf of bread in 2 days in the fridge it goes.
That's so good and I do this too. I don't actually even own a regular toaster anymore. I do have an old toaster oven. The timer on it hasn't worked in years but I have other kitchen timers and it still cooks like a champ. It even has a convection mode.
I too grew up in a humid environment and got used to using either a bread box or the fridge.
Then I realized that our bread was just cheap sugar infused garbage, and that if you pay a bit more for better bread, it does not mold anywhere nearly as quickly.
I had air conditioning growing up and my family tends to make desserts more in the winter.
The first summer living on my own, I made a beautiful blueberry pie, and the next morning I took it out of the microwave (to keep bugs away during the night- I have since learned this was also an idiosyncrasy from my parents. Most people just cover it) and it was already visibly moldy.
I’m glad I got a slice the first day, and I definitely learned a lesson but holy shit was it a surprise.
I can see it with eggs, if you don't wash eggs they're shelf stable for a couple weeks because of a natural coating. I was super confused when I went to the UK and all the eggs were on a shelf at the supermarket instead of in a cooler.
That’s mainly cuz they go through bottles very quickly! We have so many sauces at my house, it takes a year+ to go through some of the most spicy bois. Definitely need to fridge ’em. There’s only one kind that can stay out cuz i slam through tons of it every time we pizza. Some mango habanero sauce with a… Yorker cap? Whatever you call the twisty pointy cap.
I'm not sure if it's still true with technical advancements (probably not), but it used to be that rechargeable batteries were put in the fridge, because they didn't loose charge as much in cooler temperatures.
Many thinks old people do used to be useful but were made redundant with development over time.
Funny thing is years ago (like 20+) I use to put my spare batteries in the freezer, but then i learned that doing that would cause alkaline batteries to loose charge faster over time....not recall where I hear that, or if it is even true (I vaguely recall looking it up on the "early" internet)...but to this day i no longer do that...I keep them in the non-temp controlled garage....because that makes so much more sense right lol 😅
I think the funniest one is sausage. They've just got a sausage box. Literally a wooden box to put your sausage in (dried cured sausage, not like...straight out of the meat grinder sausage.)
Want some sausage? Just find the sausage box, pull out your sausage, throw it on top of the box, cut a couple slices off, then put it back on the box.
Butter is obvious, but butter is sold in 250g blocks which are about double the size of an American stick of butter, so that's a fucking lot of butter to just leave sitting out. So you can just do like a quarter a time and leave it in a covered butter dish on the counter with the rest in the fridge.
Cheese can get disgusting. Especially if it already starts out smelling like moldy feet. Even covered in a cheese bell, you can get some horrendous smells permeating the house.
A general European one is eggs. In the US we wash eggs after they are laid to help prevent salmonella. This washes the natural protective coating off so bacteria can get into them easier, so refrigerating them helps slow that bacteria growth which makes them go bad. In Europe they vaccinate the chickens instead. Eggs are sold unrefrigerated and are usually shelf stable for 3 or more weeks.
Its completely sensible. Don't get me wrong. Sausage was how you preserved extra meat, cheese and butter were how you preserved extra milk. But post-war kitchen appliance obsessed germaphobe America basically refrigerates everything, so to answer the question I thought it was fun to put a spin on it and instead of saying what they put in the fridge I'd talk about what gets left out.
Sausages outside a refrigerator are pretty normal in most of Europe I think. In butcher shops most sausage types are stored in boxes or on hooks at room temperature. I hang my dry sausages on a hook at home. Once you start cutting them up and then not eat them all at once, most are best stored cooled though.
Cheese should be stored in a cool + dark + ventilated spot imo, like a cellar or a non heated room in pre global warming France ;). But if you don't have such a spot, then most cheese should really be put in a refrigerator imo. It would really surprise me if this was a taboo in France.
That's how you can easily provoke fat bloom (the metastable phase beta 5 isn't the most stable and will stabilize into beta 6 in the fridge, allowing previously locked fats in the cristals to be freed). This alters the taste and makes it more prone to oxidation
Hmm. I do, but that was mostly because I would make sandwiches for lunch at work and wanted to help the lunch meat stay cold until it got to the fridge at work. Now I'm mostly work from home...hmm. I likely eat a loaf quickly enough that it wouldn't go bad.
