Toast lovers, I have a modest proposal for you: Do not bother with bad bread. Say goodbye to sweet, cottony, lightweight toast, the kind that squishes under a butter knife or slumps under a blanket of jam.
Just get the good stuff instead, the best bread you’re able to buy, preferably handmade loaves with sturdy crusts and tender crumbs, imbued with the flavors of fermentation. It’s more expensive, and that’s no small thing. But unlike some other items for which you may pay more, good bread is worth a little extra.
Then always keep it on hand. I would argue that the best way to store bread isn’t to wrap it in foil, plastic or brown paper bags, sheath it in a pillowcase or stash it in the breadbox. The best way to keep bread is to put it into the freezer — sliced.
The slicing is crucial here. (It’s also a minor heresy, but hear me out.) Home bread bakers know that a whole loaf freezes incredibly well.
But when you defrost it, you replicate the problem of a whole loaf fresh out of the oven: Unless you have a full house, it’s a race to finish it before it goes stale. (Yes, you could make breadcrumbs, but with apologies to devotees of schnitzel and gratins, who actually needs that many breadcrumbs?) There are only two of us at my place, so a big loaf of fresh bread is difficult to take down.
By contrast, slices of good bread in the freezer practically qualify as convenience food: single serving and ever ready, the base of a luxuriously simple breakfast, a satisfying lunch, a restorative snack, a relaxed supper. And because you have stored your slices in the freezer, they do not degrade in the quick and nasty style of sliced bread left to languish at room temperature.
Here’s what I do: Whenever I see an alluring loaf of bread, I buy it, take it home, then start slicing, cutting about half the loaf into thick, toaster-ready slices. I put the pieces in a plastic zipper bag and pop them into the freezer. (Halved bagels work well, too.)
Then any time I want a piece of toast, I take a slice out of the freezer and put it directly into the toaster. Professional bakers may blanch, but I think the results are nearly as good as toasting a slice from a day-old loaf on the counter.
You don’t need any particular type of toaster. But you do need to think of your freezer periodically. You don’t want to just abandon bread to time and freezer burn, although I can tell you from experience that neglected slices will still work, even if the toasted texture won’t be nearly as good. Whatever you do, do not drag the microwave into this, no matter how deeply frozen the bread. This is between you, the freezer and the toaster.
Bear in mind that the fresher your bread is when it goes in the freezer, the better your results will be. So gauge how much you want to eat fresh and just freeze the rest. You could even freeze it all at once, a formidable supply of toast in case the craving strikes
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