Thawning and dehydration of bread

One of the difficult things about baking bread is how to preserve it after it's done. Freshly baked bread, still warm, is probably one of my favorite things to eat. However, getting up two or three times during the night just to have the perfect baguette for breakfast in the morning, may be a bit "over the top".

Two ways to completely ruin a frozen loaf of bread is to thaw it in a plastic bag on the kitchen table, or even worse, nuke it in the micro wave oven. Both approaches produce a wet and soft crust.

In this little study I’ve tried tree approaches to thawing frozen bread, one where the loaf is wrapped in plastic, one wrapped in cloth, and one in paper. I've measured the weight of the loaves when I took it out of the freezer, and 12 hours later.

Here are the results. (Total weight loss over approximately 12 hours.)

Plastic: 0% (start weight 149g, end weight 149g)
Paper: 1.9% (start weight 104g, end weight 102g)
Cloth: 4.9% (start weight 122, g end weight 116g)

Other details; the bread was baked with a 65% hydration, baked into round loaves and cut in halves. Three halves have been used in this "experiment". This means that all loaves have a “cut”, and is not totally surrounded by crust. This probably has an effect on the total result, but the comparisons should be valid.

As you can see, the loaf wrapped in plastic doesn’t get dehydrated. This is of course expected. That is probably not entirely true though. Water will evaporate from the bread and exit into the plastic bag. However some (or most?) of this water is then absorbed by the crust, making it soft. How much water that is left in the plastic bag is difficult to tell without a more exact kitchen scale.

The paper- and cloth- wrapped loaves does loose some weight (water), but as the water is transported away from the bread, and is not locked in, like in the bag, the crust stays nice and crispy.

The paper seems to preserve the loaf better, (weight wise) than cloth. But both of these approaches gave good results taste wise.

However, when tasting, the crust actually is crispier in the cloth wrapped bread. And the overall taste is not that different. This probably means that the cloth is better for keeping the crust crisp, at the cost of more dehydration.

I may do this experiment again later, with a whole loaf of bread, with the crust intact to see if the difference is dramatic.