A home baker shares a hands-on experiment testing how stale bread performs in Tuscan tomato soup, revealing a surprising difference between bread that’s truly stale and bread that’s merely dry. By drying slices in the oven, they found that bread left for over a week held its shape in the soup, while bread dried after just four days turned to mush. The method also explores ways to accelerate bread staling—such as baking a loaf intentionally, tearing it fresh, and refrigerating it for weeks—for future recipes. The post invites readers to share their own techniques for achieving the perfect level of bread staleness.
Baking bread weekly this year, and had some 8+ day old stale and 4 day old "getting there" bread. Tried a recipe for pappa al pomodoro (Tuscan tomato and stale bread soup), and to obtain enough stale bread I dried all the bread (crumbed/cut in to < 1" pieces) in the oven at 220 F for a few hours. The recipe author is correct. There's a huge difference in resulting texture between truly stale and simply dry bread. The 8 day old bread retained its form in the resulting tomato soup, the 4 day old, even after being thoroughly dried in the oven, turned into mush. So, while I still have fresh balcony basil and cans of Cento tomatoes, I'm going to give it another go. Next time, I'll bake a loaf specifically to go stale, tear it into bite sized chunks while fresh, and leave them in a paper bag in the refrigerator for two weeks. Per science, I could increase starch retrogradation / staling through cycles of heating and cooling (microwave each morning while I make coffee, then back to the refrigerator), though I don't know if I'll remember. Anyone else have a routine for obtaining very stale bread? submitted by /u/Sanpaku [link] [comments]
