Recently I had just came back from Boston for the weekend, and needed to make myself some sort of meal in order to substitute my dinner (I had volleyball coming up in a few hours, so to eat a whole meal before it would be a bad idea). I remember I had half a loaf of ciabatta sitting in my dresser where I store all my dry ingredients, so I decided to make a bruschetta.
Unfortunately, when I had began to slice into the bread, it was almost completely stale. This baffled me because I had only been gone for a couple of days. I’ve had bread sit around at home for almost a week and it’s still very fresh.
This made me wonder, what causes bread to become stale? I know already that some sort of dehydration occurs, so leaving it in a paper bag was probably not the most optimal way of storing it. After some research, it turns out that the water in the starch moves towards the crust, causing the starch to become hard and crunchy. Yet why does the water in the starch move like that? Is it in some way similar to passive diffusion? Or maybe the crust of the bread is very electropositive, causing the water to be attracted and move out of the starch by that kind of interaction? I find it also interesting that the main reason is due to the loss of water in the bread as a whole. I would assume that if a loaf of bread was exposed to air, water would eventually evaporate out of the loaf, causing the bread to become stale overall. If the water moves towards the crust, then why is the crust still really hard as well? Is it because it’s easier for water to evaporate through the crust rather than through the starch itself?
In my opinion, the entire mechanism of bread becoming stale seems a lot more complex than it actually seems. Is it possible we can use the same mechanism in other scenarios that end up becoming beneficial in a way? Not the dehydration part, because that is already being used in a lot of places (instant ramen, bouillon cubes, etc.) but the mechanism in which water “moves” from the starch to the crust. I feel like a similar mechanism is used for air-dry clay, but I’m unsure if the two are related.
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