If You're Keeping Your Bread In A Paper Bag, You Have To Stop—Here's Why (2024)

There's nothing worse than opening a package of bread and realizing that it's gone stale. Okay, that may be an exaggeration, many things in life are worse than that, but it's definitely a major kitchen inconvenience.

Once bread is too tough to chew, you can only do so much with it. Team Delish believes you shouldn't use stale bread to make stuffing or bread pudding anyway, so the only thing you can really do is grind them up into breadcrumbs.

There are only so many batches of chicken parmesan we can make, so the best thing to do is keep your bread from going bad in the first place. At the grocery store, bread comes in so many different types of packaging—plastic, paper, or even aluminum cans. But what's the best way to store your bread in order to maximize its freshness?

The short answer: it depends. But there are a few hard and fast rules that apply to nearly every type of bread you can buy.

Whatever you do, do NOT use paper bags. Fancy loaves from artisanal brands and local bakeries are often packaged in paper bags. While this may be better than plastic from a sustainability standpoint, it's the kiss of death for your loaf. It allows all of the moisture to escape and accelerates the staling process. If your bread comes in a paper bag, you're better off swapping it out for a zip top plastic bag or a reusable option.

If storing at room temperature, make sure your bread is in a cool part of your kitchen. Heat makes bread dry out faster. And if you're using a sealed plastic bag, it'll cause your bread to get moldy. You should keep your bread far away from the stove, the top of the fridge, or any area that's near sources of heat. Instead, your best bet it to keep it in a dark, cool section of your kitchen counter or your pantry.

When in doubt, freeze it. Bread infamously goes stale pretty quickly, usually faster than we can finish it. If you want to buy bread without committing to eating sandwiches for every meal, the freezer is the perfect spot for long-term storage. If you typically only eat a slice or two at a time, you can cut your bread into pieces, pack it in a zip top bag, and keep it in the freezer. Then you can just grab what you need, when you need it.

In addition to these general rules you should follow, each type of bread has its own special storage methods. Here are the common loaves you can find at the supermarket, and the best way to avoid stale or moldy slices.

Pre-Sliced Sandwich Bread

The most common type of bread you can find at the supermarket is sandwich bread. This pre-sliced loaf is traditionally packaged in plastic bags and sold at room temperature. Before it makes it to the shelf, however, it typically spends some time in frozen trucks and distribution centers to keep it fresher longer.

Because of the use of enriched flour, corn syrup, and other additives, sandwich bread is designed to stay soft. The plastic bags they come with are ideal vessels for trapping the moisture and delaying the inevitable staling. If you're planning to finish the loaf within three to four days, feel free to keep it in the bag on your kitchen counter.

However, that is not an ideal storage method if you need more time to go through your loaf. While trapping moisture is a plus for keeping your slices soft, it comes with a cost. If kept at room temperature for too long, the humidity inside the bag will become a breeding ground for mold. If you're keeping your bread for more time, pop it in the fridge for up to 2 weeks. And as an extra long-term storage solution, you can always use the freezer.

Enriched Bread

What's enriched bread, you ask? Technically, it's an umbrella term for any bread with extra ingredients added to the standard combination of flour, water, salt, and yeast. Some examples of enriched bread are brioche, challah, potato bread, and dinner rolls. The appeal of breads like these is that the added sugar, dairy, and/or eggs introduce more moisture to your loaf—which keeps it fresher for longer.

That doesn't mean it won't go stale eventually. Just like with sandwich bread, you can keep it in plastic at room temperature for a few days. However, enriched breads typically have fewer preservatives than your standard Wonder Bread, so they will go stale if you put them in the fridge. Pop the loaf in the freezer if you're going to take longer than a few days to finish it.

Crusty Bread

This is the type of bread that goes bad the fastest. Any type of bread with a crusty exterior, like baguettes, sourdough, or country loaves, is the most susceptible to staling. That's because there's no extra richness added to the dough. Unlike sandwich bread or enriched loaves, a plastic bag is the worst storage vessel for crusty bread. Trapping moisture will keep your bread soft, sure, but it will also remove any of the crispness left in the crust.

Instead, you want to keep the bread in a slightly humid space, but with enough airflow to keep the crunch intact. The best way to store this type of bread is a bread box, which will minimize your bread's exposure to moisture while still allowing some air circulation. If you don't want to shell out for a bread box or don't have enough counter space, you could also use a fabric drawstring bag.

Just like with plastic bags, fabric bags and bread boxes aren't a long-term solution for bread storage. Most crusty bread will survive at room temperature in a properly ventilated environment for about four days, and even less time for smaller loaves like baguettes. But just like with the other loaves, you can always rely on the good ol' freezer to keep your sourdough in the best condition. When you're ready to eat, you can pop the frozen loaf directly into a 325° oven for about 20 minutes, or until its warmed through and the crust is crisp again.

How do you store bread? Let us know in the comments.