Staling facts for kids

When bread gets old, it becomes dry and hard. This is called staling or "going stale". It's a natural process that happens to bread and similar foods, making them less tasty to eat.

Stale bread often looks dry and feels hard.

Why Bread Becomes Stale

Staling is more than just bread drying out. Inside the bread, water moves from the tiny starch parts into the spaces around them. The starch molecules then change their shape and line up differently. This change makes the bread feel tough and hard.

Bread can go stale even if it's in a moist place. It actually goes stale fastest in temperatures just above freezing, like in a refrigerator. That's why bread stored in the fridge goes stale quicker than bread left on the counter. If you freeze fresh bread, it can be thawed later and still taste good.

Keeping Bread Fresh Longer

To help bread stay fresh for longer, bakers sometimes add special ingredients. These can include wheat gluten, certain enzymes, and fats called monoglycerides and diglycerides. These ingredients help slow down the staling process.

Fun Ways to Use Stale Bread

Many classic dishes use bread that has gone stale. It's a great way to avoid wasting food!

• Bread sauce is a creamy sauce often served with roast chicken.
• Bread dumplings are soft, doughy balls made with stale bread, popular in some European countries.
• Bread soups, like wodzionka from Poland or ribollita from Italy, use stale bread as a main ingredient.
• Bread pudding is a sweet dessert made by soaking stale bread in a mixture of milk, eggs, and sugar.
• You can cut stale bread into cubes, season them, and bake them to make croutons. These are great for salads or on top of soups.
• French toast is made by dipping slices of stale bread in an egg and milk mixture, then frying them. In French, it's called pain perdu, meaning "lost bread."
• In Spanish and Portuguese cooking, migas is a breakfast dish that uses stale bread.
• In Tunisian cooking, leblebi is a chickpea soup that often includes stale bread.

Stale bread or breadcrumbs made from it can also be used to make meat dishes go further, like in haslet (a type of meatloaf) or garbure (a French stew). It can also be a small ingredient in salads like fattoush or used as a base for dips like skordalia in Greek cooking.

A long time ago, in the Middle Ages, people used slices of stale bread called trenchers instead of plates!

Making Stale Bread Fresh Again

You can sometimes make stale bread taste fresh again by heating it up. If you warm it to about 60°C (140°F) in a regular oven or a microwave oven, it can become softer and more pleasant to eat.

See also

In Spanish: Pan de víspera para niños